Heidegger, Infinity, and Prayer
Being here becomes
present in the manner of a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its
own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could
be approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes
unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed
only by that coming-over (Überkommen, overwhelming). Arrival
means: to keep concealed in unconcealedness-to abide present in this keeping-to
be a being. Being
shows itself as the unconcealing overwhelming. Beings as such appear in the manner
of the arrival that keeps itself concealed in unconcealedness. (The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics, Heidegger)
In my small class on creativity,
always there is a strange mix of high school students who venture to take a
course in college, or women in their fifties who raised their children and
worked all their lives and now want to make sense of their life, in twilight of
despair and disbelief and a dim hope that maybe life is more that this samsara
of survival. Mexican-American women in
different professions, from business owners to housecleaners, and neglected and
abused young men who are burning in self-mutilation and self-destruction to
reach out to sky and the meaning of life.
I see in all of them that spark of divine that Levinas calls “height” (hauteur) which is infinite, and this is
the presence of the ineffable God in each individual. We pass most barriers and limitations, age,
gender, ethnicity, nationality, cultural background and differences, and with
those who survive the trip we enter into a strange journey into the Stalker’s
Zone (Tarkovsky’s movie). After four
intensive weeks, 8-hours class per week, we zoom in and out and overlap our spirits
in focus, and feel being seen and heard beyond any judgment, and our souls
touch each other in the exultation that love is possible [1], and we fall in deep
silent, on the threshold of the Room of Wishes.
Then I tell them you have two
minutes now; you are on the threshold, are you ready to step in? But the Room of Wishes doesn’t give you what
you wish consciously but what and who you are, your innermost desires, the one
you suffered most for, the one that you swept under the rug, into dark side of
your soul and unconscious, the one that you fashioned under cosmetics, the one
that you should be audacious to see eye in eye, are you ready to step in that
Room of Wishes and meet yourself? And
always and in all my classes, almost all my students say, no we are not ready! And we meditate each session and write a
creative piece and Bea wrote:
Week 4: A
Bit of Introspection
Breathe
in and let the oxygen fill your lungs. Breathe out and feel carbon dioxide
leave the body. Darkness pushing images up and down at the same time. Breathe
in and feel your chest expand pulling in air and feel your lungs swelling with
the energy around you. Breathe out and feel the release of negativity as it
fuses with the air and flows away from your existence. Eyelids slowly
descending and rising to meet only a sliver of light on the horizon. Breathe
in. You no longer feel your lungs expand as the wave of introspective
positivity crashes over you. Breathe out. You no longer feel the elastic push
of contracting lungs as the relief of the world lifts from your shoulders.
Blackness. Look into yourself. What do you see?
Do
you see colors splashing and writhing together harmoniously? Mixing and pulsing
with your heartbeat, each expressing large, arching emotional strokes harsh and
smooth through your consciousness. Or do you see long threads of letters
crashing together as they form words, sentences, ideas, feelings, thoughts,
then finally arriving at a whole consciousness? Do you see threads each a
different color, a different wavelength, a different thickness, a different
weight, a different texture, suspended indefinitely or in piles weaving and
tangling together? Each thread tells a story; it is a different part of you.
Their combination painting a picture of who you are and who you want to be.
But
who are you now? A survivor? A student? A teacher? A wounded spirit? A creative
spirit? How do you connect to people? Do you look them in the eye and take time
to listen to their struggles? Do you offer advice or hold out your shoulder?
Our actions are a reflection of who we are now. Our words paint portraits of
who we want to be. Our silence writes novels of who we used to be. The
combination is our consciousness adjusted for the moment. But what makes us
unique? What makes us the individual that we are? It is not our name. It is not
our home address. It is not our outward appearance any more than it is our shoe
size. These things are not what define us as the individual. So what makes us
special? I cannot answer that for everyone. There is no one thing that makes us
unique. It may be that the sum of our common parts and an indescribable force
that makes us a unique whole.
Who are you? Who am I? I do not know. I could
not tell you; at least not in this short period of introspection. I am not a
mental illness. I am not a hipster nor am I a square. I am not a genius. People
are not black and white. People are beautiful shades of grey, of red, of
orange, of yellow, of green, of blue, of purple, of colors we cannot even comprehend
seeing. Each person is a unique blend of indescribable color, texture, shape,
and size. A breath in. People are unique. They are indescribable, they are
mixes of experiences and innate disposition. People are talented in different
areas. I think I know who I am. A breath out. We are all unique. We all have
different. We all express creativity differently. I doubt myself. A breath in.
People are multifaceted. People are complex. I know my experiences. A breath
out. I understand others. I do not know who I am. A breath in. I am not ready to face the room. A
breath out. I will be someday.
Pressure
and darkness lifting. Light rising on the horizon like the sun rotating
positions with the moon. Suddenly light is filling your conscious displacing
darkness and bringing calm. Color speckles your vision becoming increasingly
defined with each nanosecond that passes. Green and brown congregate to porous
and rough textures. The green becomes the grass you laid your head on and the
leaves that provide loving protection above you. Brown becomes branches
connecting leaves together to a central base. As your eyes continue to adjust
you think about the people you know. The people who have touched your life and
you wonder how many lives you’ve touched. How many unique individuals have you
come to know? Breathe in and let the oxygen fill your lungs. Breathe out and
feel carbon dioxide leave the body.”
Then I come from where I have been, I saw the mystery and it seems I can’t say it. I feel the strange uplifting into ecstatic divine joy, pure, simple, unadulterated and undefiled with any authoritarian feature, desire to dominate, to look for short cuts, to do drugs or drink alcohol, clean like water, in soul and body, and my eyes are wet. And when I let my defenses down, I see that everyone has it, if they let their defenses down, if they feel secure and not judged, but loved as they are, ready to change; everyone sees it, everyone feels it, the ineffable joy which defies definition or identity, and it is God, the Other, the Ontological Difference between Being and beings, as Heidegger puts it, in the Arrival of concealed in unconcealed Overwhelming, of that which gives under the veil and from the Merciful as such who remains ineffable. [Overwhelming (Überkommnis) is the manner in which Being reaches beings. It preserves the meaning of sur-prise (over-taking) and thus of incalculability. Arrival (Ankunft) is, so to speak, the "place" (in beings) in which Being arrives.]
Despite the fact that
Heidegger admits the essentiality of God in his fourfold: the sky, the earth,
the mortals, and divinities, that God “deranges us”—in the sense that God calls
us beyond the existing configuration of objects to see things that shine forth
with a kind of holiness (i.e., a dignity and worth that exceeds our will), it
seems he is not clear about the relation between Being and the divine. I will
discuss that he emphasizes too much on finitude and doesn’t address the
infinity (the divine) within human beings and the fact that the Being that
withdraws in concealment in giving, is nothing but God as such. Heidegger
believes the philosophers god as the grounding and self-grounding constitutes a
metaphysics that is misleading, in that it turns God into a static state such
as a “substance” or “subject”, while for him as well as for all religions in
their original and mystical traditions, God is a loving ineffable verb, not
noun.
In this brief reflection
on Heidegger’s conception of Being and God, I will try to discuss the
complexity of philosophical metaphysics as simple as possible, by focusing on
the kernel of Heidegger’s inquiry on Ontological Difference, which basically
means that Being as such is not the same as entities we encounter and exist in
the world, there is a fundamental difference between them. I will ponder this
Difference and compare it with traditional metaphysics according to Heidegger,
Taylor, Caputo, and Peperzak, all from the anthology Religion After
Metaphysics, edited by Mark A. Wrathall. Then, with Peperzak, I will focus on
prayer as the locus of the lived experience of God, and will end this
reflection with a prayer.
What Is the
Problem with Traditional Metaphysics?
And What Is
Ontological Difference?
Joan Stambaugh defines Onto-theo-logy in this way:
“Metaphysics
is ontology (theory of Being) in that it thinks Being as the first and most
universal ground common to all beings. Metaphysics is theology in that it
thinks Being as the highest ground above all beings, ultimately as the ground
of itself, causa sui, which is the
metaphysical concept of God. Metaphysics is thus in its very nature onto-theo-logic.”
Now what is
the problem with this way of seeing things?
Let’s use an example. We see
entities, this desk, that pen, this tree, that house, this person, that rock,
do they have anything in common? Don’t
they? We think they all are, whether it
is alive or lifeless, a rock or an animal, everything IS. This “is” is considered the most general
concept under which all other concepts fall.
But is Being just a concept? Is universal “tree” just a concept? What is the
relation between the concept of tree, and this tree, a willow tree, not any
other tree? How are they related? Now what is the relation of Being (Isness as
such) and all that is, each and every entity, beings? We think all particular trees have common
characteristics which justify us calling them “tree”. We are inclined to think in biological
terms. To find the biological definition
of tree, we have to find the definition of plant, and then autotrophic eukaryotes,
unlike animals which have heterotrophic eukaryotes. Autotroph means: “An organism capable of
synthesizing its own food from inorganic substances, using light or chemical
energy. Green plants, algae, and certain
bacteria are autotrophs.”
Pay attention
to the words in this definition that we take for granted: organism, substances,
and energy. Now if you google the
definition of these terms, you will arrive to a new series of abstractions for
example for “substance”: physical matter, materials, distinct properties, the
essential part of something. And what
does “essential” and “something” mean?
Essence: constituent elementary qualities which belong to any object or
class of objects? And what are
“constituent quality” and “objects”?
Object: “That
which is put, or which may be regarded as put, in the way of some of the senses; something visible or tangible. Or: Object is a term for that about which the knowing subject is conversant.”
Pay attention that “substance”,
“essence”, “object” are metaphysical notions.
They are not just empty words, they aim at certain things, but then
“thing” also is a metaphysical notion which aim at “objects” or something
else. If one continues this chain of
reductive definitions, one will arrive at the concept “Being”, which is basically
the most general “thing” (?), or “quality” (?), or “substance” (?), or “subject”
(?), or “name” (?).
Nominalists say that these are just
“names” and we use them to make sense of the world. They see us as persons who have a mind and
the mind has a representational capacity through naming or mental images,
and by naming things and using sentences we form knowledge of the world. So, it starts from a subject (a mind [?], a
brain [?]) who moves from “inside” to “outside” and understands the world. Is this not clear and self-evident? Most of modern philosophers (Descartes, Hume,
Berkeley, Locke, Kant, and Hegel) and so many of contemporary philosophers
think so. One might wonder, is this way
of looking at the world and persons, which is sometimes called ‘modern
epistemology’ (theory of knowledge), not grounded in a distinct metaphysical
system? In Closed World Structures, Charles Taylor defines it in this
way:
“Modern
Epistemology: 1- knowing subjects as individuals; 2- taking in information
through inner representations as in
the older version mental pictures or as something like sentences held true in
the more contemporary versions.”
“Priority
relations: Knowledge of the self and its states comes before knowledge of
external reality and of others. The
knowledge of reality as neutral fact comes before our attributing to it various
“values” and relevances. And of course
knowledge of the things of “this world,” of the natural order, precedes any
theoretical invocation of forces and realities transcendent to it.”
Working
within modern sciences, “priority relations tell us not only what is learned
before what, but also what can be inferred on the basis of what. There are foundational relations. I know the world through my
representations. I must grasp the world
as fact before I can posit values. I
must accede to the transcendent, if at all, by inference from the natural. This can operate as a Closed World Structure,
because it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the extreme
and most fragile end of a series of inferences; it is the most
epistemologically questionable.” (RAM, p.50)
But
is “representational thinking” not a Closed World Structure that can be
questioned or compared with other Closed World Structures? Consider these questions: do we know a
linguistic term before or after understanding a language? For example, can I use the sentence “this is a
willow tree,” without knowing that it is a sentence in a language? So, it seems I need to know a whole language
before understanding this simple sentence.
And I need to understand a sentence before I understand a word, say
“substance”, “essence”, “object” etc.
Can I, as an individual, understand the words I use to understand the
world if there were no other individual?
After all language is a social phenomenon. Children learn language by socialization with
their parents and other people. What
about the world? Do I understand the
world by moving from “inside” me to “outside” me, or in order I understand what
is “inside” me I have to understand also and coextensively what is “outside”
me? In so many cases I understand my
“individual self” by being-in-the-world-with-other-people and they are not
separable.
But does this mean that there is nothing “inside” me that is unique to human beings? The predicament of Closed World Structures is that they can't open up to each other, to experience multiplicity or coincentia oppositorum. The "inner" and "outer" are coextensive, or with some compromise, in Heidegger's term: they are equiprimordial (Gleichursprünglich). We don't move from inside to outside or from outside to inside, they come together, and all these Closed World Structures cancel out an essential part of what is to be a self: the infinite-divine-within-finite-being-in-the-world. Now, let's look at another Closed World Structure.
But does this mean that there is nothing “inside” me that is unique to human beings? The predicament of Closed World Structures is that they can't open up to each other, to experience multiplicity or coincentia oppositorum. The "inner" and "outer" are coextensive, or with some compromise, in Heidegger's term: they are equiprimordial (Gleichursprünglich). We don't move from inside to outside or from outside to inside, they come together, and all these Closed World Structures cancel out an essential part of what is to be a self: the infinite-divine-within-finite-being-in-the-world. Now, let's look at another Closed World Structure.
Charles
Taylor: Contestation
of epistemological picture: (Heidegger and Merleau-ponty)
1)
Our grasp
of the world does not consist simply of our holding inner representations of outer reality.
We hold such representations, which are perhaps best understood in
contemporary terms as sentences held true but these only make the sense that
they do for us because they are thrown up in the course of an ongoing activity
of coping with the world by bodily, social, and cultural beings. This coping can never be accounted for in
terms of representations, but provide the background against which our
representations have what they do;
2)
As just
mentioned, this coping activity and the understanding which inhabits it, is not
primarily that of each of us as individuals; rather, we are each inducted into
the practices of coping as social “games” or activities; some of which do
indeed, in the later stages of development, call upon us to assume a stance as
individuals. But primordially, we are
part of social action;
3)
In this
coping, we don’t deal with a world of objects, but as Heidegger puts in “pragmata” or referential totality that gives us relevance, meaning,
significance, and intelligibility, not as add-on of objects, but objects find
their meaning within referential whole.
Later, we learn to stand back, and consider things objectively, outside
of the relevances of coping;
4)
In the
later Heidegger, these significances include some which have a higher status,
structuring our whole way of life, the ensemble of our significances. In the formulation of “das Geviert,”
[fourfold] there are four axes of our world in this more general sense: world
and earth; human and divine.
5)
There is no
priority of the neutral grasp of things over their value. There is no priority of the individual’s
sense of self over the society; our most primordial identity being inducted
into an old game. Even if we don’t add
the fourth stage, and consider something like the divine as part of the
inescapable context of human action, the whole sense that it comes as a remote
and most fragile inference or additions in a long chain is totally undercut by
this overturning of epistemology.
In this context, the word “Being” is not just
the most general and empty word, it is ….what?
Now, from here whatever we say, we form different metaphysical
systems. Say, Being is the ground of all
objects, it is the “substance” of all objects, and we are the “subject” against
the world of “objects”. These are
different metaphysical expressions and most of the time reductive. We reduce all the entities to some
fundamental parts, say, atom, particles, energy, magnetic field. Or we say Being is the ground of all
beings. Now, If I am idealist I would
say Being and the whole world is represented to a subject like me, so
everything including other people are in my mind and not really “outside”. In this metaphysical system, such as in
Hegel’s Absolute Idea, we see the “subject” as the ground of all beings. Or if we are objectivist, we would see Being
as the “substance” or “object” as the ground of all beings. And this is another metaphysical system. Heidegger calls this the “ontological” (a
theory of Being) part of onto-theology of metaphysics.
Now,
what is the “theological” part?
Heidegger believes when philosophy introduced God into its metaphysics,
God became the ground of all beings as the first cause that even caused itself. Da da…
the problem solved. We know
everything now. We know what beings and
entities are in the world. They are
grounded by Being. And Being is grounded
or caused by God, and God is caused by Itself.
Heidegger believes this version of metaphysics gives us a pretension of
knowledge about the world and God, which is fallacious or misleading. He says:
The
insight into the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics shows a possible
way to answer the question, "How does the deity enter into
philosophy?" in terms of the essence of metaphysics. The deity enters into
philosophy through the perdurance (Austrag is the carrying out of the
"relation" of Being and beings, endured with an intensity that never lets up) of which we think at first as the approach
to the active nature of the difference between Being and beings. The difference
constitutes the ground plan in the structure of the essence of metaphysics. The
perdurance results in and gives Being as the generative ground. This ground
itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that
is, by the causation through the supremely original matter-and that is the
cause as causa sui. This is the
right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to
this god. Before the causa sui, man
can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before
this god. (Identity
& Difference, p. 72)
Pay
attention that Heidegger doesn’t say that we should abandon metaphysics
altogether, because after all what he is saying about the difference between Being and beings (that I will discuss soon) is itself
a poetic metaphysics different from onto-theo-logical metaphysics. Second, he doesn’t reject God, on the
contrary, he holds that we have to go back to revelations and connect with the
ancient God, rather than a philosophical god.
Mark
Wrathall explains it well:
Heidegger tells us that for a real thing [not entities as
“resources” and “commodities”], a thing with existential importance, to show
up, we must have practices for dealing with the earth and the sky, the
divinities and our own mortality. Real
things themselves, in turn, will embody the way earth, sky, mortals, and
divinities condition each other.
Heidegger’s name for the interrelation of earth, sky, mortals, and
divinities is “the fourfold”…..To cite a couple of my favorite examples. Heidegger tells us that the sky contributes
to the essence of a jug as a jug-thing because the jug holds and pours out wine
and thus gathers the sky. The holding
and pouring of the wine gathers the sky, he explains, because the grapes from
which the wine is made “receive the rain and dew of the sky.” As a second example, the Black Forest
peasant’s farmhouse gathers the earth, he says, because it is placed on a
“mountain slope… among the meadows close to the spring.”
Heidegger sees that these fourfold, the sky, the earth,
mortals, and divinities, mirror each other.
He contends that God “deranges us”—in the sense that he calls us beyond
the existing configuration of objects to see things that shine forth with a
kind of holiness (i.e., a dignity and worth that exceeds our will). Heidegger understands receptivity to the
sacred as the experience of being beheld—of recognizing that there is a kind of
intelligibility to the world that we do not ourselves produce. If God is part of the fourfold, then he
wrestles with each region of the four, and brings it into a sacred own-ness.
Wrathall
continues:
If we, in turn, are receptive to God, our practices will
embody a recognition that the technological reduction of objects to resources
is an act of presumption, for it proceeds on the assumption that we are free to
employ anything we encounter in any way whatsoever. Once attuned by the divinities, technology
will no longer be able to seduce us into an endless and empty “switching about
ever anew,” because we will see certain things around us as invested with
holiness—with an intelligibility inherent to them, which shines forth out of
them. So attuned, we may be able to
establish what Heidegger calls a “free relation” to technology—a relation in
which we are able to use technological devices to support our dwelling with things. But because the draw of technology is so
strong, it is only a God who can save us, as Heidegger once asserted.
After
questioning the possibility of understanding of God metaphysically, Heidegger
makes it somehow clear that we can’t “invent” divinities on our own. We need to follow the divine revelation and
listen and await God to instruct us, indeed through ancient revelations. In Building,
Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger states:
The divinities are the beckoning
messengers of the Godhead. Out of the
holy sway of the Godhead, the God appears in his presence or withdraws into his
concealment. When we speak of the
divinities, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we
give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.
Also:
Mortals dwell in that they await the
divinities as divinities. In hope they
hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.
They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs
of their absence. They do not make their
gods for themselves and do not worship idols.
In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn. (Poetry,
Language, Thought, p.150)
Moreover,
in “Conversations with a Buddhist Monk”, he states:
I consider only one thing to be
decisive: to follow the words of the founder.
That alone—and neither the systems nor the doctrines and dogmas are
important. Religion is
succession…Without the sacred we remain out of contact with the
divinities. Without being touched by the
divinities, the experience of God fails to come.
However,
obviously he hasn’t experienced God
for himself, to be guided to stay in faith resolutely. He talks about withdrawal of God or absent of
God at points. Only one who hasn’t
experienced God for oneself talks like this:
All
we can do, Heidegger argues, is prepare ourselves for the advent in the hope
that, through a gift of grace, we can receive our own revelation. “I see the only possibility of a salvation in
preparing a readiness, in thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the God
or for the absence of God in the case of decline; that we not, to put it
coarsely, ‘come to a wretched end’, but rather if we decline, we decline in the
face of the absent of God.”
But
if one experiences God for oneself, or put it differently, if God guides one,
then one realizes that God never was absent or will be absent; it is "I" who is the veil. In The
Experience of God, John Caputo talks about the phenomenological experience
of the impossible (not as logical contradiction of possibility), but as
“something phenomenological, namely that which shatters the horizon of
expectation and foreseeability. For if
every experience occurs within a horizon of possibility, the experience of the
impossible is the experience of shattering of this horizon. I am resisting all a priori logical and onto-theological
constraints about the possible and the impossible in order to work my way back
into the texture of the phenomenological structure of experience.” (Religion After Metaphysics, p.124)
Praying as an Experience of God
I
already mentioned that Heidegger discusses why one can’t pray, sing, and dance before
philosophers’ god, in onto-theo-logical metaphysics. I will try to elaborate it a bit more.
Heidegger’s
objection to onto-theology is that they ground all beings in Being as if Being
is standing on the side and then bring beings to the fore. Onto-theology assumes that the Being of beings (the genitive) is the
metaphysical substratum or subject, something which constantly and statically presents itself like an object. Onto-theology
leaves the mystery out and assumes it has shed complete light upon the
ineffable. What Heidegger tries to do is
to show the difference between Being
(which is not an entity) and beings
(entities and human being as a distinct being or Dasein). He problematizes
“representational” expressions about the relation of Being and beings:
Thus we think of Being rigorously only
when we think of it in its difference with beings, and of beings in their
difference with Being. The difference thus comes specifically into view. If we
try to form a representational idea of it, we will at once be misled into conceiving
of difference as a relation which our representing has added to Being and to
beings. Thus the difference is reduced to a distinction, something made up by
our understanding (Verstand). But
if we
assume that the difference is a contribution made by our representational
thinking, the question arises: a contribution to what? One answers: to beings.
Good. But what does that mean: "beings"? What else could it mean
than: something that is? Thus we
give to the supposed contribution, the representational idea of difference, a
place within Being. But "Being" itself says: Being
which is beings. Whenever we come to the place to which we were supposedly
first bringing difference along as an alleged contribution, we always find that
Being and beings in their difference are already there. It is as
in Grimm's fairy tale The Hedgehog and
the Hare: "I'm here already."
Heidegger
believes onto-theological metaphysics has permeated language so deeply that it
is difficult to bring the coincidentia
oppositorum of the concealed-unconcealed (the present & absent; the
same & difference) of Being and beings into formal language; so, he tries
to express it through a poetic language.
He says that Being Overwhelms (unconcealing itself) beings in the
Arrival (concealing) at beings. He
poetizes:
Being
in the sense of unconcealing overwhelming, and beings as such in the sense of
arrival that keeps itself concealed, are present, and thus differentiated, by
virtue of the Same, the differentiation.
That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between,"
in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are
borne away from and toward each other. The difference of Being and beings, as
the differentiation of overwhelming and arrival, is the perdurance (Austrag is
the carrying out of the "relation" of Being and beings, endured with
an intensity that never lets
up.) of the two in unconcealing
keeping in concealment. Within
this perdurance there prevails a clearing of what veils and closes itself
off-and this its prevalence bestows the being apart, and the being toward each
other, of overwhelming and arrival. In our attempt to think of the difference
as such, we do not make it disappear; rather, we follow it to its essential
origin. On our way there we think of the perdurance of overwhelming and
arrival. This is the matter of thinking, thought closer to rigorous
thinking-closer by the distance of one step back: Being thought in terms of the
difference.
Heidegger tries to
show that Being is not an entity like any other being but each being is the
"manner" of appearing of Being. The problem with our languages is
that, according to Heidegger, our metaphysical solidification of
"substance" and "subject" as Being, our very
subject-predicate language, makes it almost impossible to understand
Ontological Difference between Being and beings. Why? Because according to him
Being withdraws into concealment in its very manner of arriving at and thus
unconcealment in beings. And this is not easily sayable, or indeed it is ineffable.
This
is the ineffable God, the Giver (the far and near, the immanent and transcendental)
who is concealed in its unconcealment, that which one can experience but not
“know”. In Religion after Onto-theology, Peperzak actually objects to
Heidegger intimations that all ancient metaphysicians sought to simplify the
definition of God in causa sui (the
grounding God), so as if to reveal the mystery of God. He contends:
[T]he classics have not submitted God to the question: What
is the ground of God? On the contrary,
all of them—and most clearly the Neoplatonists—have insisted on the abyss that
separates all caused causes and connections, as integral parts of the universe
or the Nous (spirit), from God as the One who cannot be caught by any categorical
or conceptual grasp. (p.107).
Peperzak
rightfully, I think, also criticizes Heidegger exaggeration that previous
philosophers such as Spinoza and Descartes really took the idea that God is the
cause or ground of God’s own being. But
to clarify what “godly” means, Peperzak focuses on prayer:
It seems to me that ‘prayer’, of which I venture here a
clumsy description, can be recognized as a summary of religion by the faithful
adherents of all religions, though, of course, its unfolding into communal
traditions, practices, liturgies, laws, and beliefs shows many apparently
irreconcilable differences…If my statement may be accepted not only as a
‘subjective’ impression but as a (hypo)thesis that deserves to be considered,
we can simplify our problem by asking how the onto-theo-logical project can be
related to the possibility and actuality of prayer…. We must ask ourselves why
the God to whom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Jesus prayed seems to
be forgotten or even contradicted by “the God of the philosophers”. According to an answer this question has
often received, the God of the philosophers is not interested in human history
or nature; he is not an inspiring, protecting, compassionate, creative and
recreative, saving, and consoling presence.
Is he even a person?...Can we think an infinite person? If we can, this
will not be enough to approach God, because God is not only the infinite Other:
he/she/it is also that in which “we live and move and have our being” (Acts
17:28).
In prayers we don’t reflect but surrender, on
our knees, we meditate in the presence of God, in which like in air and light,
we are floating. There is no declaration
of knowledge, but appeal, not intellectual certainty, but intense desire for and
faith in the Merciful. The metaphysical
god as well as Heidegger’s divinities don’t see and declare the Day of
Judgment, at least not explicitly. In prayer,
a believer learns to accept one’s eternal soul and the Day of Judgment, which
is similar to Tarkovsky’s Room of Wishes in the Stalker, where one will meet
one’s true self. Are you ready? Are you ready that now, which is too late to
become a penitent and not a judge, as you will be judged, to enter the Room, where your own body will
judge you[2]? Prayer holds me closest to the Day of
Judgment and as if I am on the threshold of the Divine Truth about what I have
done and who I have become. I pray on my
knees to deliver me from my forgetfulness and ask God to help me not to have an
ignominious exit from this world.
Heidegger speaks of the fourfold of the earth, sky, mortals, and
divinities, but in prayer we feel and meet the fifth fold: the examination of
our eternal soul, meeting God, the eternity as such. Heidegger misses the fifth fold, the eternity
in the mortal because he doesn’t appeal explicitly to revelations of God. In Being
and Time, splendidly he discerns the being of Dasein (human being) from
objects (present-at-hand, Zuhandenheit)
and equipment (ready-to-hand, Vorhandenheit),
but, as Peperzak reminds us, he “remains within the orbit of the modern
egology, according to which all beings are there (or given) to and for a center
whose awareness encompasses all of them within the total but finite horizon of
its universe.” Strikingly, Heidegger
never speaks of infinite. But how can we
talk about God and divinities without talking about infinite? If Being is different than beings and
nothing, it has to be infinite as God.
Peperzek refers to Levinas’s Totality
and Infinity, to posit prayer as a relation to God AND
being-with-the-other:
Already in Totality and Infinity, Levinas appeals to Plato’s
difference between ousia (being or essence) and to agathon (the Good) as names
for the world of beings and God, respectively.
The Good, or God, is neither a being, nor an essence, nor being (ousia or
einai) as such. However, with regard to
religion, Levinas’s main thesis holds that the relation to God (which I have
named “prayer”) coincides with the relation to the other human person. (p.112)
Levinas
uses the term “height” (hauteur) and
“infinite” because we contact with God, “the Most High”, accordingly, in the
presence of human Others. Religion is
charity. However, I think believers can
feel God constantly and specifically in prayers. When I was an atheist and
didn’t believe that God even exists, of course prayer didn’t make sense to
me. It took years after my shattering
experience of the divine, to establish the constant feeling of the presence of
God and the most conspicuously in my prayers.
I can’t explain the phenomenology of the experience of prayer fully in
this note. All I can mention for now is
that when I pray to God in concentration, I do feel ascendance to the origin,
to the Day of Judgment, when I will meet God, and I can’t overcome this wish or
desire to meet God in person on the earth in this life, because I feel God so
close, and the change is in me, because God was and is always close to us.
Peperzak
finishes his paper with this passage:
The most extensive and subtle discussions about the
questions I have briefly indicated can be found in the Muslim, Jewish, and
Christian philosophies of the Middle Ages…Their reflection was supported and
animated by a religious experience for which the mystery that caused their
(onto-theo-)logical problems did not appear as impossible. In their prayers, the otherness of God and
their unity with the embracing quasi-totality of God’s presence—i.e., the
identity of the infinite difference with the quasi-totality that separated them
from and unified them with God—was quite appropriate to the only non-idolic
God, although a formulation of this contradictory unity on the level of logic
remained clumsy and inadequate. What
became obvious in lived devotion broke through the limits of their reflection,
because their devotion reached farther than reflection. The latter [reflection] is tempted by
exaggeration and reduction: deism sticks to God’s otherness and separation,
whereas pantheism exaggerates the identity without being bothered by the
abyss. Both have a partial conception of
presence, while atheism prefers to stay within the walls of the finite
totality. (p.120)
I
finish this reflection note with a prayer of my own:
I
pray to you God
In
this moment of exaltation
When
I can see we can fly
When
my daughter becomes the spirit of eternity and floats in the divine
When
my son steps out of the anxiety of identity and body and reconciles the
opposites
Where
the ideal has the meaning that you gave to our frail bodies—taghva, our God-consciousness.
I
express my gratitude to you for all and all
The
joy and the suffering, the pleasure and the pain, the sorrow and the happiness
I
pray to you to purify my body and heart
To
bring your light and peace to my soul
To
give me power and time to compensate for my mistakes
I
pray to you to guide us to the exuberance of your connection
--in
this cold night of nihilism and atrocity.
I
pray to you to forgive our self-blindness and cure us to see our limitations
And
to resolve our dissonance and doubts
In
reconciling the body with the truth of the infinite within us,
And
overcoming the duality within
To
say and to act, two
To think and to desire, two
To think and to desire, two
To
be and should be, two,
The
conscious and unconscious, two
To become One so that to pass the threshold
And
to step into the Room of Wishes.
[1] I just received the last reflection writing of my 17-years-old student in the summer 2016 intensive course on Creativity. It brought tears to my eyes and warmed my heart:
Weekly Reflection
7/25/16
For
this last weekly reflection, I have a lot to talk about. But I wanted to focus
about how reading the words of Socrates written by Plato have really given me a
different outlook on a lot of matters. I found this reading to be extremely
insightful. Reading it a few times, I thought I had the correct idea that the
main message was pointing out how Socrates noted that he knew nothing and that
he proved to a bunch of different craftsmen and tradesmen that they knew
nothing in a sense that they were also ignorant. However, after the class that
we had on Thursday, it was very clear that this was not the only ideas
portrayed in the readings. It was astounding to think that he used a way to not
necessarily critique people or call them out in a negative way, but you express
a type of knowledge and wisdom that honestly was on a different level of
thinking that I feel people couldn’t accept or try to change and adjust too.
Sidetracking
a bit, connecting this idea of non-contradicting yourself and being consistent
that leads to logic and understanding yourself is a prime idea that I didn’t
clearly see until it was explained on Thursday. As I was doing my apology
exercise prior to the talk on Thursday I had this preconceived notion that
Socrates was only trying to defend his reasoning behind the fact that he knows
nothing and the people he questioned knows nothing. I only understood that part
of it. I couldn’t fully comprehend how he incorporated this idea of creativity
and how his words tied into Rogers, Jung, and Palmer.
After
the talk on Thursday I was able to get a clearer sense and better understanding
of the words of Socrates. I was able to understand his creativity of him
stepping outside of his comfort zone. Out of the safe zone that we all stay in.
His ability to be called the wisest man and instead of spread that around,
simply wonder and question if he could find anyone out in the marketplace that
was smarter than him. The ability to not try to create the idea of logic, but
just come about to creating it with the methods of asking people and finding
out inconsistencies in their words as well as contradictory sentences. These
are what I didn’t understand fully before and after was truly surprised and
amazed of the huge beauty in this. Listening to you speak about how this 50-year
time span that it took him to really understand, examine, ask, and find out
about his life, and the lives of others and come to that realization that, “I
really know nothing,” is simply beautiful. I was amazed at the tactic he used
and unconsciously creatively mastered and created many different solutions.
The
fact that what he speaks about on examining ourselves and understanding that we
don’t truly know everything is the same central theme we have been discussing
in that we have to grow as a person and the first step to doing so is
understanding and acknowledging ourselves to the fullest extent.
I walked into this class wondering
what I would learn. Wondering if this class was worth it to drop and just give
up. Wondering whether or not it was going to be interesting, boring, an easy A,
all of that. I walked in with preconceived notions that this would just be a
way to fill in my day with obligation and duty. But as I write this final
reflection to this class, I realized I walked into something truly spectacular.
Not in any class have I been more challenged, more motivated, and more
accepting of myself, the class, and my peers. Not in any class have I been able
to look back on the years I have taken and say, I truly got to know myself a
whole ton. I was able to say that in this class.
What
I wanted to reflect about is the amazing journey I’ve taken. The steps from
week 1 to week 6. The path that had me wondering if it was even worth it. I’m
glad to say that I am happy I chose to stay. I’m extremely happy that I decided
to push forward. At the end of it all, I loved the class. I was able to accept
dark parts of me that I thought I could never explain. I was able to write
about things that happened to me that I wasn’t necessarily proud of. I was able
to accept that and turn my emotions and feelings into pieces of beautiful art
and writing. From Socrates, Rogers, Jung, Palmer, Amy Tan, and all the Ted
Talks we have watched, I honestly want to utilize all of these ideas and
concepts and pass them on to my friends and other peers. I find these words of
wisdom from all of these people to honestly be easy to relate to and honestly a
great experience to hear about. To understand one’s darkness to be able to
create and stay in the light is amazing.
Overall,
these 6 weeks have been extremely eye opening. I came in close-minded thinking
that I wouldn’t have fun and wouldn’t enjoy the experience. I endured finding
out more about my talents and my creativity and understanding parts of myself
that was hard for me to accept. I even was able to write about it in a journal
and relate to all the readings from Ueland and even to all the Ted Talks. It’s
amazing to see what trying new things will do. Just like we have been told
numerous times, “Just do it.” No matter what people may think of you doing
something, as long as you tried to do it and you are able to say that you’ve
experienced something amazing, then it will help you grow as a person. Even
taking note of the experience by writing about it later on in the day helps.
Truthfully,
ending this class is a little heartbreaking to me, but they always say that
when things end, it brings about new beginnings and I can honestly say this
will be true. Taking in all this knowledge, I definitely without a doubt will
be able to grow as an individual and utilize all this knowledge to better
myself and help better those around me since I am the next generation that will
be responsible to help do the earth good.
I
have learned nothing but positivity in this class and I’m ecstatic to be able
to teach what I have learned to other people especially my younger brother. He
will soon be exposed to the extreme judging in High School and the idea that
society wants us to be a certain way especially during the teen years when
people are constantly judging each other for what they have and what they own.
I find this to be extremely sad and I can’t help but worry for my brother. I am
anxious most of the time and I try to help instill him morals and values that
will make him a good person and a stronger and better person.
This
class taught me growth in a sense that it not only mental but spiritual.
Honestly I can’t believe that this class is coming to an end. These weeks went
by so quickly and the next thing I knew, it was the last week. However, I
enjoyed the video of the conference of the birds and the animation. I was so
surprised to see that it related entirely to the central theme. This idea that
we are scared of what we will encounter when we try things. The idea that we
are afraid to know ourselves to seek ourselves and to be our true selves. The
birds in the youtube presentation showed that lack of hope in becoming and
understanding themselves but they were able to persevere and at the end it was
a beautiful outcome. You got to see them each grow and take the trials and
tribulations and surpass the negativity that was growing with every step
towards finding the leader. Surprisingly, this was relating amazingly to
Socrates, Jung, Rogers, and Palmer. I didn’t expect this to happen but it did
and I was truly amazed that in different and various forms of creativity that
we have experienced, the same message has been spread in a variety of forms.
From videos, to interviews, to even simple written documents, I was able to see
this central theme of the idea of creativity and the idea that we have to
accept and acknowledge all of our experiences to hone and grow our creativity.
Just
ending this last reflection I would like to thank you ultimately for the
experience and being the type of teacher to make us think rather than memorize
and remember. This made the experience way better. It was a different style of
teaching that makes the class enjoyable and really gave us a way to think hard
on what we have learned and how we can apply this to our own lives.
