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ABSTRACT
In this article I argue that we have arrived at the "end"of theology. By
the "end"of theology I do not mean that theological reflection and inquiry as
an academic undertaking has abruptly ceased, or that it will not persevereas
a widespread occupation in the foreseeable future, but simply that significant
theological discussions in the familiar sense have been cut loose from their
historical and metaphysical moorings, which have rotted away. The article
attempts to analyze the dilemma of theology from the standpoint of the crisis
of Western thought as a whole, especially in light of the radical verdict
concerning the "end"of the Graeco-Christianmetaphysical tradition that has
been enunciated in the past century by Nietzsche and, more strictly, by
Heidegger. However, the essay seeks to confront the exhaustion of the
genuine possibilities for theologizing in a broader systematic and
philosophical manner than was offered by the death-of-God movement
during the previous decade.
The line of argument draws heavily on the insights of the later
Heidegger, but does not merely "apply" Heidegger to a conventional set of
theological issues. The radical character of Heidegger's philosophy has been
unfortunately slurred over by contemporary theologians, and thus a
"Heideggerian"theology is no more cogent than a squaring of the circle.
Heidegger contends that Western thinking has always been "onto-theological" in nature. He calls for the "overcoming" of ontotheology, which at
the same time implies the transcendence of theology as a discipline. The
transcendence of theology amounts to a passage beyond the traditional
manner whereby theological thinking has been concerned with the ens
realissimum and has based its deliberations on a particular metaphysics of
language that serves to re-present the divine as an object for a subject, or as
the transcendental subject. Heidegger holds that the end of metaphysics
corresponds to the collapse of the subject-object division in thought along
with the removal of the grounds of metaphysical certitude implicit in the
thinking of this division. The Cartesian revolution shifted the foundations of
certitude from that of the "constant presence" of the metaphysical object to
Carl A. Raschke is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of
Graduate Studies at the University of Denver. He is author of Moral Action, God and
History in the Thought of Immanuel Kant, and coauthor of Religion and the Human
Image. Two other books, The Interruption of Eternity and The Breaking of New
Wineskins, are scheduled for publication in 1978.
Carl L. Raschke
160
161
II
As soon as he had written his magnum opus Sein und Zeit, Heidegger
envisaged the primary objective of his thought as the "overcoming" of
metaphysics (cf. Mehta: 34). But why does metaphysics need to be overcome?
Carl L. Raschke
162
According to Heidegger, "metaphysicsis a name for the pivotal point and core
of all philosophy" (1969: 14). Metaphysics is the ancient science which asks
the fundamental question about Being, about the "ground"or ultimate reason
for "beings" (Seienden) as they appear in the world /4/. Yet, ever since the
early Greeks, who first cultivated the science, metaphysics has been concerned
exclusively with questions of "physics"/ 5/ ratherthan the primordial "meta-"
question which, for Heidegger, penetrates to the "essence" of metaphysics
itself. The essence of metaphysics gives hint of itself in the fundamental
ontological question: Warum ist iiberhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr
Nichts ("Why are there, in general, beings rather than nothing?"). The
question brings to light the basic dilemma of ontology-that beings are not
just "there," but that they emerge from somewhere else. They cannot
ultimately be understood by reference to other beings, or the highest being or
the abstract and indeterminate concept of being-as-a-whole /6/, but only
through Being as it is concealed within the appearance of beings to the degree
that it appears to be "Nothing" (or no-thingness). Being is always distinct
from any being, or totality of beings, a state of affairs which Heidegger
designates the "ontological difference." Yet the ontological difference "as
difference" is that which has not been properly thought by metaphysics, which
instead has busied itself with discovering the Being of beings, the ontos on, the
being which has being "to the highest degree" (1962: 248). In short,
metaphysics has not thought the "unity of its essence," or the genuine
relationship between beings and Being, a unity which has remained
"unthought" (Ungedacht) at the same time it has been "forgotten."
Metaphysics has made a being out of Being; it has turned Being into theprotos
arche, the "first principle," the sufficient reason, the primum mobile, or
"God." Thus Heidegger speaks of the "onto-theological" character of
metaphysical thinking, which is the foundation of all Western thinking,
including philosophy, science, and theology. The overcoming of metaphysics
amounts to a thorough rethinking of the essence of thinking itself, which in
the long range constitutes the most compelling assignment of our age.
"Onto-theology," or metaphysics, rests on a particular way of thinking
that has gained ascendancy for Western man and is responsible for his current
amnesia toward Being, evidenced in the end of philosophy and theology
together. This way of thinking Heidegger for the most part calls
"representational"(vorstellend). Representational thinking is not so much a
falsification of reality as a "limitation"in human experience which acquires an
unconditional character. Historically, representationalthinking was spawned
out of philosophy's original conceptualization of Being as constrained by the
prevailing paradigms of logic and grammar inscribed in the structure of the
Greek language. For Heidegger, representation consists in a re-praesentatio
whereby a thing is "presented"as a "what" in "its sameness and constancy"
(1973: 60). This re-presentation is a movement of logical thought (i.e., thought
as praedicatio, as judgment, as determination of a "what") away from the
immediate revelation of the being in its primitive manifestation, a
manifestation which Heidegger describes as simple "presence"(German =
163
Carl L. Raschke
164
165
Carl L. Raschke
166
but foreshadows the very apotheosis of the human individual, who arrogates
for himself the role of God as the absolute subiectum, as First Cause. The
"objectivity" of reason is at last unmasked as bare self-willing. Hegel is
succeeded by Nietzsche, for whom the absolute ground of certainty is nothing
but "the will to Power" / 16/. In Nietzsche the primacy of the subject as the
source of "truth" is unconditionally and unblushingly affirmed. Thus
Heidegger speaks of Nietzsche as the "last" Western metaphysician. In the
same vein Nietzsche, notwithstanding his protestations of God's death, can
also be considered the last theologian.
In short, theology by Heidegger's reckoning constitutes one facet of the
devolution of metaphysics as part of "the fatefulness of Being." Theology
serves as one of the guarantors of representational thinking by preserving
through the concept of "faith"the apodicity of the subject. Science safeguards
the steadfastness and fungibility of "objects" which can be relativized,
quantified, and "explained" in keeping with hypotheses, formulas, and
statistical laws. The "end"of metaphysics in the modern world is visible in the
preemption of philosophy by science. Philosophy, which once subsisted in a
unity with metaphysics and scientific thinking, now passes over into science in
its modern technological form. "The end of philosophy proves to be the
triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world
and of the social order proper to the world" (1972: 59). But the technoscientific spirit at the same time emanates from the same historical forces
which undergirded Christian subjectism. Christian theology is the
precondition, according to Heidegger, for the "process of secularization"
(1970: 147). Christian theology erects the scaffolding for the truthfulness of
subjective will, for the apprehension of Being as "reality in the sense of
indubitable representations"which Heidegger dubs "self-willing"or the "will
to will" (1973: 48). Without the achievement of subjective certitude,
technology as the historical culmination of man's forgetfulness of Being for
the sake of managing and controlling the items of his world would not have
been possible. Modern science and technology are not so much Greek in
origin as they are Christian /17/. The end of philosophy coincides with the
end of theology; for the fates of both philosophy and theology are entwined
with the larger realization of metaphysical-representational thinking in our
technological world culture. Frequently Heidegger speaks of the
contemporary period as the "atomic age," not just with reference to the
obvious fact of the harnessing of nuclear energy, but also as an allusion to the
atomization of human experience concurrent with the drive toward
technological dominance. The pure representation of existing things by
modern thought enables man to shape the world as completely amenable to
his will and thus gain total power over it. Thus, Heidegger comments,
technology arises as "the metaphysics of the atomic age" (1960: 48). Science
and technology succeed in atomizing and conquering the universe of entities,
theology in isolating as the bare subiectum the human subject by severing it
from its ontological foundations. The overcoming of metaphysics amounts to
the transcendence of onto-theology, whether it poses as "objectivist"science
or the "subjectism"[Subjectitat] inherent in theology.
167
III
168
Carl L. Raschke
book by David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order. Tracy's book is an ambitious
effort to chart a "revisionist theology" which confers a new depth of meaning
on traditional religious symbols and theological constructs by fleshing out the
fundamental modes of experience that coalesce together in the modern
"pluralistcontext." As Tracy announces in this first chapter, such revisionism
endeavors to indicate those kinds of theological operations "which will be
appropriate to the central meaning of the secular faith we share and to the
central meanings represented in the Christian tradition" (14). The "adequate
criteria" for doing this sort of theology are specific "representativefacts" of
history and culture (i.e., enduring myths and symbols from our Western
religious legacy) which can be somehow brought into mediation by "critical
correlation"with the meanings ascribed to our present experience of ourselves
as beings in the world. Theology thus consists in an ongoing "hermeneutic"
which adopts as its touchstone not the "original" or primordial meanings
supposedly locked in the cultural facts, but the consistent structures of
contemporary secular (and, by extension, "religious")self-understanding, or
in another sense "the genuine values of modernity" such as "openness,"
"autonomy," and "change" (175). The business of theology is not to come up
with a transcendental guide for life in the world, but "really to make our
Christian self-understanding meaningful in our own life styles and our own
reflection" (177). The canons of "meaningfulness," as well as "truth" for
theological deliberation, according to Tracy, are "the 'conditions of the
possibility' of the experiencing self in its full multi-dimensional radicality"
(173-74). Tracy confirms Heidegger's diagnosis of the subjectivist revolution
in modern thought when he insists that theology must follow the "turn to the
subject" characterizing modern metaphysics by concentrating on our
"primary experience of ourselves." The theologian's use of the tradition
compasses no more than adjudicating "how and why such past meanings
either are or are not meaningful and true [we might add, "for our experience']
today" (240).
Another book which recurs to the experior in order to cement a new
foundation for theology is Louis Dupre's Transcendental Selfhood. Dupre
wants to go beyond a hermeneutic of secular consciousness, even one which
takes into its purview the "religious" or ecstatic dimension of such
consciousness, and find a pure region of "transcendence"within which one
can trace a framework of meaning for both past and present. As the title of his
book intimates, Dupre locates such a region of transcendence in the "self"not the everyday, conscious self to be sure, but the "immortal"self which is the
matrix of the mystical experience. Such a self-the one apprehended in total
"inwardness" which the classical mystics named the "soul"-surpasses the
given, empirical self of simple subjectivity and exists as the ganglion of a
special kind of "experience" which contrasts with ordinary ego-awareness.
Yet Dupre's ultimate self, as the Archimedean point of a new theological
articulation of sacred "experience," still represents the bare metaphysical
subiectum. It is interesting that Dupre criticizes Heidegger for having refined
the principle of subjectivity "without rethinking the content of the
determining subject"(6). For Dupre seems to misunderstand that it is the very
169
170
Carl L. Raschke
171
deftly displaced God from the heavens into the world-conjuring agency of the
self.
A critic of a draft of this article has raised the objection that perhaps a fair
number of the theologians previously indicated are actually grappling in their
own fashion with the same dilemmas Heidegger outlines. The same critic also
questions whether theologians who do not grant Heidegger's premises can be
expected to make the kind of "Heideggerian"moves the article demands. The
second objection can be easily dispensed with, as it is rather fatuous.
Naturally, a partisan of realist metaphysics will predictably balk at the whole
twentieth century enterprise of ordinary language philosophy, but that does
not neutralize the critical advances of the latter method over the former.
Heidegger's views on theology are not apt to be easily metabolized, since they
are in themselves quite radical and discomforting. Contemporary theology
has too readily misrepresented Heidegger, either by making a straw man out
of him /20/, or by attenuating him so that conventional theological
"discourse" can invoke him as a muse for its deliberations /21/. The first
objection that contemporary theology and Heideggerian ontology have a tacit
kinship can only be upheld, therefore, if Heidegger is benignly domesticated.
Assuredly, contemporary theology has followed Heidegger in his dismissal of
the classical metaphysical conception of God as object. But contemporary
theology has not seen through his thorough critique of the metaphysical
prioritization of the subiectum. Indeed, it has remained spellbound by the
categories of thought appropriate to this "last" phase of the career of ontic
thinking. So long as theology clings to the need for the "idea" of God in the
traditional sense, even though it qualifies the status of this being as a
"representation," an "imaginative construct," or as a "symbol" of our
common experience, it persists in a crumbling allegiance to a thought
experience that has reached its closure. It is unlikely that theology is willing to
abjure this allegiance, since it would no longer be theology any more. But that
is the radical step of "crossing the line" (as Heidegger puts it) which the
overcoming of metaphysics (and pari passu the "end of theology") requires.
IV
But what might lie beyond the "end" of theology? Can theology be
reconstituted in some form that overreaches its historical collapse into the
bare experior? The quandary of theological self-scrutiny at present is coupled,
as we have maintained, with the terminal stage of Western metaphysics, which
in turn implies the exhaustion of the meaning of its representations. One
popular alternative to theology, at least in the religious domain, has been the
kind of ecstatic experimentalism and syncretism that turns away from all
normative traditions or determinate symbols and probes toward the
dissolution of language and thought in the mystical flight to the depths of the
mind. The force of such introvertive ecstasy depends on the quelling of the
ego-consciousness which merely functions according to one noted
172
172
Carl L. Raschke
173
174
Carl L. Raschke
holy, a humility which is perhaps too severe and taxing for theological
professionals to bear.
Heidegger writes that we live in the age of the "default" or "absence,"
rather than the final "death" of God. And he goes on:
But absenceis not nothing;ratherit is preciselythe presence,which
mustfirstbe appropriated,of the hiddenfullnessand wealthof what
has been and what, thus gathered,is presencing,of the divinein the
worldof the Greeks,in propheticJudaism,in the preachingof Jesus.
This no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its
inexhaustiblenature.(1971b:184)
The "veiled arrival" perhaps remains out of sight to the extent that we
theologians willfully cling to the mere form and not the substance of the
concepts that have been our guideposts for two thousand years. To go beyond
the form requires an act of "thinking"in the deepest sense of letting-be that
which is. "Few," Heidegger observes, "are experienced enough in the
difference between an object of scholarship and a matter of thought" (1971b:
5). Theology today has lost its "matter of thought" because it has become
estranged from the essential language through which bonafide thinking is
possible. Or, as Thomas J. J. Altizer observes in his most recent and
appreciably prophetic book:
Theology today is most fundamentallyin quest of a languageand
mode wherebyit can speak. Above all it is in quest of a language
wherebyit can speak of God. Ever increasinglyand decisivelythis
questis becominga questfor languageitself,andfora newlanguage,a
languagewherebywe can actuallyand fully speak.(1)
Theology, however, can only attain to such a language when it, instead of
clamoring to speak the word, lets the word be spoken.
NOTES
In the lattercase I havein minda bookby AlanWatts(1964).Watts'approach
/ /
is echoed in variousand sundrypopularor semi-popularwriters,such as Jacob
Needlemanor HarveyCox, who callfor a returnto primary"religiousexperience"in
placeof conventionaltheologicalstatements.
/2/
Heidegger,of course,evenin his laterwritings,neverdiscussessystematically
the"end"of theologywiththe sameattentionhe givesto philosophy.Heidegger's
own
remarksabout theologyare ratherscatteredand somewhatobscure(see his essay
"Phenomenologyand Theology"(1976)and his "Epilogue"to "TheThink"(1971b:
183-86). Nonetheless,the suggestionof the "end"of theology is clear in both his
criticismsof Westernphilosophyand his broaderdiscussionof the"onto-theological"
characterof metaphysics.
175
The locus classicus for essays on the theological application of the later
/3/
Heidegger is the volume edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. There
are essays in German as well, which are too numerous to be cited. Another essay of
interest here is Heinrich Ott, "Hermeneutical and Personal Structure of Language,"
(169).
The term das Seiende ("being") is a technical word used by Heidegger that
/4/
cannot be straightforwardlytranslatedinto English. I have used the more conventional
translation "being," rather than the neologism "essent"devised by Ralph Mannheim
which seems to be preferred by Heidegger scholars, in order to avoid confusion for
readers not steeped in the subtleties of Heidegger's thought.
"From the very first 'physics' has determined the essence and history of
/5/
metaphysics" (1969:14).
The idea of Being as that which is most indeterminateand abstract is advanced
/6/
by Hegel: "Being is indeterminate immediacy" (1929: 93).
Cf. ". . . the beingness of beings is thought as presence for the guarantee of
/7/
representation. Beingness is now objectivity"("Overcoming Metaphysics"[ 1973:88]).
See, for example,
/8/
xii.6.1071b27, xiv.4.1091a34.
Aristotle,
Metaphysics
i.3.983b29,
iii.4.1000b,
Carl L. Raschke
176
knowledge of this Subject as Substance and of the Substance as this knowledge of its
action. . . . This last embodiment of spiriti-spirit which at once gives its complete
and true content the form of self ... is Absolute Knowledge" (1967: 797).
Cf. the last line of Nietzsche's The Willto Power (1967: 550): "Thisworld is the
/16/
will to power-and nothing besides!"
/17/
European sway, has been guided and ruled by Christian conceptions" (1958: 31). A
thorough historical-cultural account of the way in which the Christian world view has
undergirded the Western techno-scientific spirit is Van Leeuwen.
Consider Wittgenstein's comment that "is what is linguistic not an
/18/
experience?" (1953: #649, 166e).
This position is laid out by Gordon Kaufman in his An Essay in Theological
/19/
Method.
Cf., for example, Tracy constantly stereotypes Heidegger, without ever doing
/20/
justice to him, as being "anti-technological," "anti-scientific," or as a carrier of "the
individualist tradition" (1975: 12, 243).
/21/
Heidegger, of course, himself warned against being used by theologians for
their own purposes. Some recent commentators have stressed the decisive separation
between Heidegger's ontological thinking and theology (See, for instance, Joseph
Kockelmans "Heidegger on Theology.") The most comprehensive study of the
relationship between Heidegger and theology, which ends up with the same verdict
(though not quite as strong a one) as Kockelmans', appeared a few years ago in
German. (See Annemarie Gehtmann-Siefert.)
/22/
Heidegger argues that the essential metaphysical problem transcends the
duality of subject and object, which becomes a unity in the disclosure of Being (1962:
171ff.).
/23/
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