Deep Dive Outline: George Kovacs' The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology
Podcast available on Apple and Spotify
Intro (00:00:22)
Cause-god (00:14:40)
Godless age and Technology (00:28:06)
New Possibility (00:37:56)
“Whoever seriously says that ‘God is dead’ and bets an entire life on it like Nietzsche, is not an atheist” (213). - Martin Heidegger
----- Intro (00:00:22)
Topic Overview
Cause-God – obsession with origins and dependence on concept of causality as a result
Godless age – similar to Taylor, it isn’t just lack of belief, but it’s an ambivalence, and undecidedness
Technology in relation to our godless age
New Possibility – as long as there’s an awareness that the techno-scientific worldview is missing something, that keeps the candle lit; it leaves open the possibility for a new age. Think Habermas’ Awareness of what is Missing
Critiques of Heidegger
Inscrutability and taking advantage of everyday understand of words
Quietism
Ambivalence on human agency and value judgements
----- Cause-god (00:14:40)
“Western philosophy has just been a search for a first cause, a first being that is the source of all other beings, and attempts to tell one causal “story”. But this storytelling “does not tell the ‘whole story’. It is not concerned with the question of Being as such, with the wonder of the ‘is’, but merely adopts the highest being (God) as the final story (explanation)” (43).
“the interpretation of Being as 'idea’ leads to the interpretation of the cause of beings as the highest being, as God.” (160).
Metaphysics is theological in nature; it views Being as God, as the highest among all the particular beings. This is the reason for the phenomenological rejection of the Cause-God. From Heidegger's point of view, the Cause-God is nothing else than the result of the metaphysical explanation of Being (as "idea") 160).
“in the Christian view, there are three regions of beings: God, World (nature), and man. These three regions of beings constitute the objects of special metaphysics (theology, cosmology, psychology). The object of general metaphysics (ontology), is being in general” (125).
“ex nihilo fit – ens creatum. Non-being means, then, the complete absence (Abwesenheit) of all beings apart from God” (155).
But for Heidegger, “ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit. This means that every being as (a) being is made out of (comes from) Non-being…. In anxiety Non-being is disclosed together with beings-in-their-totality… Beings as beings are ‘born’ out of experiencing of Non-being” (155).
Philosophy (as phenomenology) “tries to overcome the Christian understanding of Being of beings as being created (Geschaffenheit) by God” (43).
“The idea of God as being in Being, however, should not be interpreted as the subordination of God to Being as Cause; the primacy of Being in relation to beings is not identical with the idea of a causal connection” (179).
----- Godless age and Technology (00:28:06)
What do we mean by describing today’s age as a godless one?
“The absence of and our undecidedness about (the) God, the flight of the gods, the loss of the sense of the sacred, divine dimension of dwelling in the World… are a forgottenness of the Holy, of the forgottenness of Being. The thinking of Being, therefore, is a prerequisite of the thinking of the God-question” (170).
“Modern ‘technical’ man is fascinated by the noise of machines and is inclined to take this noise for the voice of God” (13).
“Being is undergoing a historical destiny in technology, in the essence of technology as ‘enframing’ (Gestell), as ‘the self-gathering in which Being as Being refuses itself’ The essence of ‘technology’ (Technik) is Being itself as the danger (Gefahr) in the form of ‘enframing’, and, therefore, this danger in Being can never be overcome by human activity because man is not the master of Being” (177).
“The realization of the danger in ‘technology’ as the forgottenness of the essence of Being becomes the rescuing of the essence of Being itself” (177).
— - - New Possibility (00:37:56)
“To the metaphysical cause-God, Heidegger claims, man can neither pray nor offer sacrifice; he cannot fall on his knees; he cannot dance and play music before this (philosophical) God” (187).
“The liberation from the power of the metaphysical God is meant to be much more than a mere liberation from; it is intended to be a liberation and a being free for the ‘divine God’” (14).
“Whoever seriously says that ‘God is dead’ and bets an entire life on it like Nietzsche, is not an atheist… The enduring of the renunciation of the old gods is the ‘preserving (Bewahren) of their divinity’” (213). Heidegger
“We need to retrieve (wiederholen), to find again, the beginning (Anfang) of our historical there-being, and thus to transform it into another beginning. This retrieval (recapturing) shall allow us to ask the question about the meaning of Being and, thus, to grasp this question as a question about our situation with regard to Being itself (about our attitude toward ‘what’ and ‘how’ Being is). We need to reconstruct, we need to commence again more originally (ursprunglicher wiederanfangen), our history, because our relationship to Being has been disturbed (it became ambiguous)” (136).
“The main question for Heidegger’s phenomenology, in the final analysis, is not how the human mind reaches out to God, but much rather, how the voice of the transcendent God breaks into and becomes discernible in the human condition” (114).
(00:50:20)