This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
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.
That certainly includes Asian philosophical and religious traditions, given the substantial history of engagement with these by German orientalists. See Marchand 2009.
See note 2.
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.
The analysis of ‘The Concept of Phenomenon’ in BT, ¶7 (pp. 28–31) calls into question the phenomenological basis for this distinction.
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.
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).
‘Just as through one lump of clay everything made of clay is known, so difference of shape is just name, dependent on speech: “clay” 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:
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.”
See Nicholson 2010 for a historical account of different positions on this issue among individual Indian thinkers.
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).
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)
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.
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.
See Gonzalez 2006.
‘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, “existence” is understood beforehand as “emergence-from-self” revealing oneself and in becoming revealed to oneself coming to oneself, and because of this occurrence “being” with itself and thus in itself, “being” itself. God as existence, i.e. the existing God, is this in himself historical God.’ (GA42, 190-91/STF, 109; translation modified).
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).
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.
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)
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).
References
Aristotle (1970). The physics (trans: Wicksteed P.H. and Cornford F.M.). Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Aristotle. (1980). The metaphysics: Books I-IX (trans: Hugh Tredennick). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bernasconi, R. (1995). On Heidegger’s other sins of omission: His exclusion of Asian thought from the origins of occidental metaphysics and his denial of the possibility of Christian philosophy. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 69(2), 333–350.
Bernasconi, R. (2009). Must we avoid speaking of religion? The truths of religions. Research in Phenomenology, 39, 204-223.
Crowe, B. D. (2008). Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion: Realism and cultural criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Caputo, J. (1978). The mystical element in Heidegger’s thought. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Caputo, J. (1982). Heidegger and Aquinas: An essay on overcoming metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press.
Cooper, J. W. (2006). Panentheism, the other God of the philosophers: From Plato to the present. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.
Correya, B. (2003). Heidegger and Sankara: A comparative study of ‘thinking of being’ and ‘advaita.’. Kalamassery: Jyotir Dharma.
Davis, B. W. (2006). Rethinking religion, faith and practice: On the Buddhist background of the Kyoto School. Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, 23, 1–12.
Fitzgerald, T. (2000). The ideology of religious studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Feuerbach L. (1854). The essence of Christianity (trans: Evans, M.). London: John Chapman.
Gall, R. S. (1987). Beyond theism and atheism: Heidegger's significance for religious thinking. Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff.
Gonzalez, F. (2006). Whose metaphysics of presence? Heidegger’s interpretation of energeia and dunamis in Aristotle. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 56, 533–68.
Grimes, J. (2007). Sankara and Heidegger: Being, truth, freedom. Varanasi: Indica Books.
Gutschmidt, R. (2012). Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Heideggers Spätphilosophie und der phänomenologische Theologie. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 60(2), 193–211.
Hanley, C. (2000). Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger: The role of method in thinking the infinite. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Heidegger, M. (1954a). Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Günther Neske.
Heidegger, M. (1954b). Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. Pfullingen: Günther Neske.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (trans: Macquarrie, J. & Robinson, E.). New York: Harper & Row
Heidegger, M. (1967). What is a thing? (trans: Barton, W.G. Jr. and Deutsch, V.). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
Heidegger, M. (1969). Identity and Difference (trans: Stambaugh, J.). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought (trans: Hofstadter, A.). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1975). Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (trans: Lovitt, W.). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1980). Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
Heidegger, M. (1985). Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom (trans: Stambaugh, J). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1987). An introduction to metaphysics (trans: Mannheim, R.). New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press.
Heidegger, M. (1988). Die Technik und die Kehre 7th ed. Pfullingen: Gunther Neske.
Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic writings (trans. Glenn Gray, J., Capuzzi, F.A., Krell, D.F.). New York: HarperCollins.
Heidegger, M. (1998). Pathmarks (trans: McNeil, W.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2004). The phenomenology of religious life (trans: Fritch, M. and Gosetti-Ferencei, J.A.). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and truth (trans: Fried, G. and Polt, R.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hick, J. (1985). Problems of religious pluralism. London: Macmillan.
Kearney, R. (2001). The God who may be: A hermeneutics of religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kearney, R. (2004). Hermeneutics of the personal God. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 60, 929–52.
Kovacs, G. (1990). The question of God in Heidegger's phenomenology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
McKinnon, A. (2003). Manufacturing religion: The discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press.
Macquarrie, J. (1984). In search of deity: An essay in dialectical theism. London: SCM Press.
Marchand, S. (2009). German orientalism in the age of empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mehta, J. L. (1971). The philosophy of Martin Heidegger. New York: Harper & Row.
Mehta, J. L. (1987). In Heidegger and Asian thought, ed. Graham Parkes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Heidegger and Vedanta: Reflections on a questionable theme.
Nicholson, A. J. (2010). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and identity in Indian intellectual history. New York: Columbia University Press.
Otto, R. (1925). Meister Eckehart's Mystik im Unterschiede von östlicher Mystik. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 6, 325–50.
Pattison, G. (2011). God and being: An enquiry. Oxford: University of Oxford Press.
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.
