QUOTATIONS FROM HEIDEGGER’S ATHEISM: The Refusal of a Theological Voice by Laurence Paul Hemming, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002

Chapter One: Introduction

20: This would allow a more genuine attunement to the question of God, while saying nothing of God. It would discover the meaning of the flight of the gods and the last god which preoccupies Heidegger in the Beitrage zur Philkosophie . . . Heidegger says that “the flight of the gods must be experienced and endured”.48 (Beitrage zur Philosophie (GA65), p. 27. “Die Flucht der Gotter muss erfahren und ausgestanden werden.”) Such an endurance and experience prepare for the nearness of the last god, against the “prolonged Christianizing of god”49 (Beitrage, p. 24. “Die lange Verchristlichung des Gottes.”) so that “the nearness to the last god is the keeping of silence. This must be set into work and word in the style of reservedness”.50 (Beitrage, p. 12. “Die Nahe zum letzten Gott ist die Verschweigung. Diese muss im Stil der verhaltenheit ins Werk und Wort gesetzt werden.”)

21: Is not God in God’s very self kept in silence?

23: Bultman . . . never opens up the deeper and harder question of why I might just take it for granted that God knows whom it is that God will address. (GCM: Is “address” here meant verbally or perceptually?) Such an assumption takes away every power the address has that it might in its very addressing, its essence, constitute the one to whom it speaks. This is the gratuity of address. For Heidegger, who Dasein ‘is’ is more disclosed in all being-addressed than in what any Dasein has to say of itself. (GCM: “Address is obviously of major importance to Hemming, but in Heidegger—unless someone has suggestions!!!—it is of little importance at least as ansprechen, adressieren, wenden an, on pages 34, 154, and 408 of  Sein und Zeit, and, relating to Rede, of great ambiguity. “The attuned intelligibility of being-in-the-world is expressed as discourse. The totality of significations of intelligibility is put into words”, SuZ p. 161, Joan Stambaugh trans. This seems clear and definitive.

“The way in which discourse gets expressed is language’, ibid. But :Hearing and keeping silent are possibilities belonging to discoursing speech”, ibid. And “It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’, ibid p. 164. All ‘noises’ are heard within an innerworldly context so that they come with some sort of interpretation. “Discourse and hearing are grounded in understanding”, ibid. The, “Authentic silence is possible only in genuine discourse. In order to be silent, Dasein must have something to say (Heidegger latter adds “and what calls for saying [das Zu-sagende]? (being) [Seyn].), that is must be in command of an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. Then reticence makes manifest and puts down ‘idle talk’. As a mode of discourse, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein so primordially that it gives rise to a genuine potentiality for hearing and to a being-with-one-another that is transparent”. “The Greeks do not

  have a

word for language, they ‘initially’ understood this phenomenon as discourse. However, since the logos came into their philosophical view predominately as statement, the development of the fundamental structures of the forms and constituents of discourse were carried out following the guideline of this logos”, p. 165. “But how are we to define what is spoken in this discourse? What does conscience call to the one summoned? Strictly speaking—nothing”. Ibid, p. 273. “The call is lacking any kind of utterance. It does not even come to words, and yet it is not at all obscure and indefinite [GCM: What is not ‘obscure is “its ownmost potentiality-of-being”, ibid.]. Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence [Heidegger’s italics] . THUS IT NOT ONLY LOSES NONE OF ITS PERCEPTIBILITY . . .!!!! [my italics], ibid. “Thus” the most important ‘speaking’ of all is “silence” that is “nothing” but is “perceptible”. Any suggestions? How can you be addressed by “nothing” either

verbally or perceptually? How can any answer have any rational form or experiencial basis? And what does Hemming mean by the “essence” of addressing when the concept is so vague in Heidegger?)

25: “. . . Rahner has . . . decided the question of God from the vantage point of faith prior to any phenomenological inquiry, which as I shall indicate is precisely a move Heidegger seeks to overcome, and is precisely that move which both would yield Rahner’s understanding of esse as formulated in consequence of ontotheology and protects it(for faith) from the ontotheological consequences of its being subsumed under metaphysics. It is this deciding in advance that for Heidegger has already foreclosed the question of theology in relation to philosophy, already discovered the3m to be apart before ever asking why. In this sense, Heidegger’s holding apart of philosophy and theology differs from those of his theological interlocutors in that he does not take it for granted but rather makes it the subject of genuine phenomenological inquiry. The task of philosophical atheism is just the methodological face of that inquiry in its being undertaken.

26: . . . [F]or Heidegger it is simply not possible ever to posit the esse of anything (and here, of course, I am explicitly referring to ipsum esse, which is understood to be God) in and of itself, even the esse of esse, or the essence of essence, but rather that in the unfolding of the esse of God within Christian theology it is always a question concerning salvation and not metaphysics that is at issue.

28: (quoting Hans Jonas) “Instead of theology’s finding validation or corroboration for itself in what has been borrowed from itself, the real case is that philosophy must examine the philosophical validity of Heidegger’s borrowing from theology.”

Jonas points out the fact that Ott’s appropriation takes for granted that Heidegger’s philosophical position can underpin a theology of faith.

29: . . . I am . . . concerned . . . with Ott’s resistance to raising Heidegger’s critique of theology as a problem in itself . . . Ott takes it for granted that what Heidegger says in his philosophical inquiries can provide a basis for theology that will be fruitful. All of these thinkers enforce a form of distinction between the provinces of theology and philosophy that result in theology only ever being informed by Heidegger’s thought and never self-tested against what that thought concludes.

Ott presupposes that Heidegger has resolved the question of the being of being-human, or Dasein, and so never opens up the question of how any revelation of God in itself throws human being into question . . . [They] never question the self-discovery of the finitude of being human . . . the finitude of Dasein is taken strictly as a philosophical problematic and one that is to be addressed by God, not fundamentally altered in the carrying out of an understanding of address in and of itself.

. . . [They] take for granted that there is philosophy and there is theology, and that they stand apart.

Otto Poggeler asks the question “did Heidegger . . . direct theology into the formative role of exegesis and find a new path for this task through existential interpretation? Or did he, by means of Nietzsche’s talk about the death of God, bring all theology into question? . . . [T]his could be taken as a preliminary statement about the scope of this book.

30: . . . [T]he existential horizon . . . offers theology the opportunity to place itself into question all over again in the very engagement with Nietzsche, experienced in the explication of the meaning of the madman’s proclamation of the death of God. Why is the term experience at issue here? As I demonstrate in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, the death of God is a Grunderfahrung, a basic experience (rather than a basic thought) of Western thinking. It is nothing thought, yet is what provides for thinking to think of (the) nothing. It is nothing thought, because it is what thinking takes most for granted.

Heidegger cannot be adjunct to any given theological project—hermeneitics, transcendental Thomism or radical systematics—but rather his atheism, properly understood, will bring us into confrontation with that tradition from out of which theology has also worked. In this way, it will become possible to understand why Heidegger believed that a path could be revealed along which theology can become self-questioning, without rendering either the philosophy or the theology into objects or discrete domains of inquiry.

33: “The first philosophical step in understanding the being-problem consists in, not muthon tina diegeishai, not in ‘recounting a history’, that is not determining beings as beings through tracing them back to another being, as if being itself might have the character of some possible being”.82 (Sein und Zeit, p. 6. “Das Sein des Seienden ‘ist’ nicht selbst ein Seiendes. Der erste philosophische Schritt im Verstandnis des Seinsproblems besteht darin, nicht muthon tina diegeithai, ‘keine Geschichte erzahlen’, d. h. Seiendes als Seiendes nicht durch Ruckfuhrung auf ein anderes Seiendes in seiner Herkunft zu bestimmen, gleich als hatte Sein den Charakter eines moglichen Seienden.”) Beins, as that which is to be asked about and brought about as a question, cannot be brought to light and questioned in the way that beings themselves can. Ontology, in other words, is inherently not nartatable.

34: . . . Heidegger does not seek an awareness as an experience of being in contrast to its being thought. This supposed maddening aspect to Heidegger’s work has nothing to do with the privilege of experience over thinking, but rather is the very mark of inattentiveness, to letting something be unheard, which is yet an unfolding of an understanding.

It is not the narratability of ontology that is at issue, but the question of the narrating: who narrates, and why? In the self-disclosure of the narrator to him- and herself, the narrator becomes an issue for the narrative., the narrative becomes his and hers, mine. The narrative gives the narrator to be – it is what goes in advance of him or her and has to be discovered, and yet insofar as it is essential, insofar as it really constitutes and gives being to the narrator, it is already at work in her or him –the narrator has already been made-narratable by being. This disclosure of the narrative is therefore a self-discloser which, nevertheless, must perforce account for the world out of which the narrator is given. If ontology is inherently narratable, it is because—if it really is ontology—it is already narrating.. The inherence refers to the narrator, not to being.