Transcript: George Kovacs The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology

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“The main question for Heidegger’s phenomenology… 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) – George Kovacs

----- Introduction (00:00:27)

This is the second Book Brief episode of the Religious Studies Podcast and is quite a change of pace compared to our first episode, which was on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. While that book was a sweeping historical text approached philosophically, this book is very narrow in scope, focused on one specific topic within one specific philosopher’s thought.

Kovacs’ book is the result of his scanning all of Martin Heidegger’s writings (and he wrote a lot) with the goal in mind of determining what Heidegger has to say about God. But it turns out that outside of his essay Elucidations on Holderlin’s Poetry, Heidegger talks sparingly about God. So beyond documenting and interpreting the places where Heidegger explicitly talks about God, Kovacs is also digesting Heidegger’s philosophy in general and seeing where it may leave God.

Additionally, as we’ll see, God is a particular concept with a history. And Heidegger is doing everything he can to avoid concepts that have histories. He is trying to create his own philosophy, his own language for how to talk about the world. Moreover, viewed from a certain perspective, his mission is a modest one. I’m sure Heidegger would agree with an undergrad professor of mine who in every class said: “In philosophy, we walk before we run.” As we’ll see later, Heidegger takes great care to make sure we’re headed in the right direction before we move down the path. He wants to make sure we know what we mean when we use words like God.

Given the form and content of Kovacs’ book, doing a chapter by chapter summary is impossible in a 15 minute timeframe, so I’m going to segment the rest of this podcast thematically to get the main ideas of his book across in the simplest form possible. First, we’re going to discuss Heidegger’s general philosophy. After laying out his philosophy, we’ll then discuss whether we think his philosophy is atheistic or theistic. And lastly, we will look at where his philosophy leaves us with respect to the notion of God itself.

----- Heidegger, Western Metaphysics and his phenomenology (00:02:54)

What you’re reading is probably like version 10 of me trying to not turn this into an Introduction to Heidegger. But, here we are. Heidegger was a philosopher who studied philosophy, but he thought it was all wrong. Now, for a philosopher, this isn’t that absurd: why write something someone else has already written? And, I guess, there’s probably some arrogance involved too. Philosophers can tend to be a little arrogant. But Heidegger “disagrees” with the philosophers that preceded him in a very particular way. Not only are they all wrong, they are all wrong for roughly the same reason: they all thought they were starting at the beginning, but they skipped a step.

While Western Philosophy has spent its time trying to determine what is real, what reality is, what reality consists of. Heidegger thinks this is a misstep, and a fatal one. Rather, according to him, if we are doing philosophy right, we must first start with what we mean by saying something is at all. As Kovacs puts it, traditional Western philosophy “is rooted in the ‘whatness’ of beings; [Heidegger] is focused on the ‘thatness’ of beings, on the thoughtworthy fact (phenomenon) ‘that’ they are” (229). In other words, when we try to say some particular thing, or set of things, is, or exists, or exists in some particular way, we have avoided reflecting on what it means for things to be at all. More simply, we forgot about the word ‘is’. If we think we can say of some set of things that they exist, and of some other set of things that they do not, then we better be able to know what it is that distinguishes those two sets of things.

And so, to do philosophy as it ought to be done, to determine what we mean by the word “is”, to understand what it means to be in general, the fundamental question becomes: “why are there beings at all and not rather nothing” (133)? In other words, what makes it possible for beings to be at all? To try to bring this down to earth: step one is to be a stoner and just go: “Wow, existence. That’s crazy, man.” And then step two, the work of philosophy, is to say: “Ok, what makes this possible?” And of course, what that “this” consists of, and laying out all the steps behind understanding that “this” is complicated, but that is Heidegger’s task. But again, Heidegger is modest, or at least he has a very high bar for philosophy. So if this is as far as we get, then so be it.

I will very quickly lay these steps out. The first step is a negative one, which is realizing that being isn’t “a thing”; it isn’t a particular thing amongst other things. You don’t have a rock, and an apple over there, and then being over there. And crucially, and we’ll go into this further in the Deep Dive, it also isn’t the set of all existing things; being isn’t the totality of all that exists. It isn’t existence, or the universe as we might say in English. It is just being in general.

So positively, what can we say of being in general? Well, we can’t imagine being itself without first imagining some particular existing thing. If we say a rock, myself, and Homer’s Illiad all exist, all have being, all are, then at the very least, existence, or being, is presumably some feature they all share. But that feature only seems possible through our recognition of it through those particular things, through our ability to take those three things separately and assign some attribute to them. Even as all three have “it”, this commonality, such that we say they exist, it then must be something “behind” or “beyond” or “removed from” them. And if that’s true, then that presupposes features of the world beyond the things that are directly in front of us. Those features then, are: us (1), recognizing (2), that fact, at some point in time (3). So philosophy isn’t determining the essence of an apple; it is taking a step back and recognizing that an apple exists at all, that an apple is a thing of which we can say it exists. And importantly, it is a recognition that we are the sorts of beings who can take this step back to have such a recognition.

And so, for Heidegger, we become part of this analysis. We didn’t create being, or existence, but we are a part of the puzzle. And really, as you can see from the three pieces of the puzzle, it isn’t really an “it”, it’s more of an activity, an occurrence at some moment, of which we are a part.

This approach Heidegger undertakes, his philosophical method, this concentration on and analysis of the sequence we just walked through, is what he calls phenomenology. And as we said above, crucially, he views this approach as doing something fundamentally different than what philosophers who came before him were doing. I’ll spend a bit more time discussing his methodology in the Deep Dive episode for this book, but for now, just understand that his phenomenological methodology is just what we said above: approaching his study with the goal of starting with existence in general, and then laying out what makes our recognition of it possible.

----- Beyond A/theism (00:09:15)

So here we can ask the question: is his approach theistic or atheistic? And there are three levels on which we can address this question: methodology, scope, and conclusion.

It is pretty obvious that methodologically, it is atheistic. Heidegger does not presuppose a God of any kind to undertake his analysis.

But what about what his philosophy says about God? As Kovacs argues, the notion of God, on which the sides between theism and atheism are drawn, is not something Heidegger is concerned with in his study. He is focused on being in general, the meaning of being, not the being or non-being of the particular being we call God. The notion of God is “inadequate… for the elaboration of and as a response to the ontological (Being) question,” which constitutes the scope of Heidegger’s studies (43). So he just simply doesn’t talk about God.

But what about whether his philosophy leaves room for God at the end? Does his philosophy point us in the direction of God? Well, because part of what Heidegger is arguing is that all of Western Metaphysics, all of Western philosophical thought, is misguided, then that also means that all prior attempts to argue for the existence of God, or even talk about the being of God, are misguided. The very task of trying to determine the existence of God is not within our potential, or is at least not addressable in the way we thought it was. The question of God, as defined by humanity so far, is not one we can answer.

So on the one hand, he is shutting down the possibility of determining the question of God, but on the other hand, he is opening up a new possibility.

----- The notion of God (00:11:10)

As it is with everything for Heidegger, the distinction he draws between Western Philosophy leading up to him and the philosophy he takes himself to be doing is relevant. To reiterate, philosophy leading up to Heidegger only focused on particular, already existing things, and not on existence in general. They assumed they knew what it meant for some thing to be. And according to Heidegger, it is existence in general, whatever that is and however we can approach it or understand it, that should come first. We must take baby steps.

God, then, is a particular existing thing of which we have mistakenly presumed to know the being of. And in his Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry existence in general, what Heidegger refers to just as “Being”, is the same or analogous to the Holy (das Heilige). So just as Western Metaphysics has been too focused on particular things and not on the fact that things exist at all, so too has the West become too focused on God, while having lost sight of the Holy. We have confused the notion of God, what we think of when we think of God, with the divine or the Holy.

There are versions of this idea within religions themselves. For Muslims, you cannot visually represent Allah. Some Jews, do not write the word Yahweh or God. They recognize this thing, whatever it is, is so powerful, so awe-some, so terrifying, that we can neither be in its presence nor grasp it, let alone define it in some image or concept.

And now with Heidegger’s phenomenology, we can know that we were simply being naïve in trying to determine the existence of God, in trying to talk of God, in trying to answer the question of God, or to think such a question is meaningful for us.

“Man cannot understand the meaning of the divine and of God (and of the gods) without having understood first the meaning of the Holy. When we know what we mean by the Holy and when we understand Being, only then shall we be able to ask the question regarding the meaning of the word God” (170).

In the Deep Dive episode for this book, I will spend much more time on this relationship between what Heidegger says philosophy has missed in the West and what he is saying we have missed with respect to the Holy. This will include reviewing his concept the cause-god, which is really quite insightful and is fundamental to his overall project. I will also discuss his perspective on the secular or godless age we live in and how his phenomenology can help make sense of it. And then I’ll also touch on technology, which for Heidegger is pretty important. There’s a lot out there written on Heidegger and technology, so I don’t really want to use this book to spend a ton of time on it. But I do think it’s relevant here with respect to the godless age that we live in. This has been religious studies and we’ll see each other soon.