SOPHIA

DOI 10.1007/s11841-015-0510-0

Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God?

Sonia Sikka 1

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Keywords Heidegger . God . Being . Holy

Even posed as a question, the title of this article will likely strike readers familiar with
Heidegger’s thought as bizarre. Surely, Heidegger produced no ‘argument for the
existence of God’? He is, after all, known for his critique of metaphysics and
ontotheology, which would seem to rule out the methodology that traditional arguments
for the existence of God have followed. He is also known for his pejorative remarks on
the ‘God of the philosophers’, a lifeless abstraction that he distinguishes from the ‘God
of faith’. As a result of these aspects of his thought, most scholars using Heidegger as a
positive resource for philosophy of religion (and there have been many over the years)
have focused on non-metaphysical approaches to the question of God, highlighting
Heidegger’s phenomenological and historical reflections on the character of being-in-
the-world, the loss of a sense of the holy, the flight of the gods and so forth.1
I contend in this article, however, that Heidegger advanced views that (a) should be
counted as arguments; (b) have consequences for both the existence and the conception
of God; and (c) do connect with the traditional concerns and methodology of natural
theology. I begin by examining critically Heidegger’s own claims about the relation
between religion and philosophy. These would seem to rule out any form of natural
theology from the start, but Heidegger’s stated position on this point is, I maintain, both
normatively and descriptively flawed. Furthermore, as I demonstrate in the second part
of the article, Heidegger’s own critique of subjectivism provides reasons for taking
experiences of the holy seriously as evidence of a true dimension of being, thereby
offering a counterpoint to reductive explanations. Finally, while Heidegger’s account of
the holy is oriented towards ‘God’ and ‘gods’ understood as certain kinds of entities, I
question his claim that God is necessarily a being, as well as his insistence that being

1
Examples include Gall 1987; Kovacs 1990; Wrathall 2003, 69-86; Vedder 2007.

* Sonia Sikka
ssikka@uottawa.ca

1
Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, 55 Laurier Ave, 8th Floor, Ottawa, ON K1S
2W2, Canada
 S. Sikka

itself is not God. Heidegger’s thought has been described as ‘panentheist’ (Macquarrie
1984; Cooper 2006) and compared with theological and metaphysical positions in
which God is decidedly not an entity, such as those of Meister Eckhart (Caputo 1978;
Sikka 1997) and Sankara (Mehta 1987). In light of these analyses, I revisit the question
of the relation between ‘God’ and ‘being’, asking what understanding of being could
warrant an equation between the two terms so as to constitute an affirmative theological
position and where Heidegger’s reflections on being stand in relation to this position. I
conclude that while Heidegger does not offer a proof for the existence of God,
understood as an actually existing perfect being, he not only challenges the premises
and inferences on which a good deal of modern atheism is grounded but points to the
possibility, albeit not certainty, that the human relation to such a perfect being genuinely
indicates something about the character of being itself and is not merely the result of an
anthropomorphic projection.

Religion and Philosophy

In the winter semester of 1920/21, Heidegger delivered a lecture course called ‘Intro-
duction to the Phenomenology of Religion’, whose content has since been reconstruct-
ed from his own notes and those of his students. In line with Heidegger’s version of
phenomenological method, the course takes ‘factical life’ as its ‘point of departure’
(GA 60, 8/PRL, 7). It seeks to describe the structures—the experiences, objects, ways
of being—of that life, while reflecting the lived experience of religiosity against
philosophical conceptualizations and abstruse theological speculations. ‘No real reli-
gion’, Heidegger says in these lectures, ‘allows itself to be captured philosophically’
(GA 60, 323/PRL, 244). While this statement implicitly refers to a multiplicity of
religions, the account Heidegger gives in these lectures is exclusively focused on
‘primordial Christian facticity’ (GA60, 116/PRL, 83), based on an interpretation of
early Christian documents. As such, it is a phenomenological description of the life of
Christian faith, where the primal phenomenon of religion in general is supposed to be
‘faith in the existence of God’ (GA60, 29/PRL, 20).
The selection of early Christianity as the exemplary form of religion lies at the basis
of the radical distinction Heidegger draws between faith and philosophy in subsequent
works. He draws this distinction not, as he sees it, in order to denigrate one or the other
but to protect the integrity and worth of each in what he considers to be separate and
incommensurable spheres. In ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, first delivered as a
lecture in 1927, Heidegger says that ‘faith (Glaube), as a specific possibility of
existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is
an essential part of philosophy and that is factically ever-changing’ (GA 9, 66/P, 53).
Consequently, ‘there is no such thing as a Christian philosophy; that is an absolute
Bsquare circle^’, and, ‘on the other hand, there is likewise no such thing as a . . .
phenomenological theology, just as there is no phenomenological mathematics’ (GA 9,
66/P, 53). The ‘form of existence’ proper to philosophy involves constant questioning;
philosophizing as a way of being intrinsically involves a readiness to change position.
Phenomenology, as a form of philosophy, requires suspending inherited theories and
prejudgements in order to pay close attention to the phenomenal facts of experience,
including what we experience and the acts and comportments through which we
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

experience it. By contrast, faith, on Heidegger’s reading of it, remains devotedly

constant to the revealed answers in which it has faith. There can be no phenomeno-
logical theology on this account because theology deals with the contents of
faith, and the form of existence intrinsic to faith, which includes commitment to
a particular set of beliefs, is alien to philosophy, whether as phenomenology or
metaphysics.2
An Introduction to Metaphysics, first given as lecture course in 1935, is emphatic on
this point. Philosophy as metaphysics asks, most fundamentally, ‘why is there some-
thing rather than nothing?’ (Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?)
(GA 40, IM, 1), whereas for faith, this question is foolishness. That is because
Heidegger writes:

Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth has the answer to the
question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ even before it is asked:
everything that is, except God himself, has been created by Him. God himself, the
increate creator, ‘is.’ One who holds to such faith can in a way participate in
the asking of our question, but he cannot really question without ceasing to
be a believer and taking all the consequences of such a step.^ (GA 40, 8-9/
IM, 6-7).

Heidegger does add: ‘a faith that does not perpetually expose itself to the possibility
of unfaith (Unglauben) is no faith but merely a convenience’ (GA 40, 9/IM, 7). Faith
tested through doubt, however, is still fundamentally different from the spirit of open
questioning that defines philosophy. Thus, Heidegger reiterates: ‘a BChristian
philosophy^ is a round square and a misunderstanding. There is, to be sure, a thinking
and questioning elaboration of the world of Christian experience, i.e. of faith . . . That is
theology’ (GA 40, 9/IM, 7).
This attempt to separate faith from philosophy is partly motivated, as I have
suggested, by a desire to protect religion, not necessarily from critique but from a kind
of philosophizing that fails to be true to its experience and is therefore phenomenolog-
ically inapt. One might sympathize here with Heidegger’s worries about the danger of
misrepresenting the phenomenal content of religious life through the wrong kind of
philosophizing. Yet there are also serious difficulties with the sharp separation he posits
between faith and philosophy, along with its wholesale dismissal of philosophical or
natural theology. One of these stems from the exclusive focus on Christianity, which
limits the generalizability of Heidegger’s observations. It is striking that Heidegger’s
lectures on the phenomenology of religion barely mention any religion other than
Christianity, in spite of the fact that considerable information about other religious

2
I do not read Heidegger’s phenomenology of faith as claiming that ‘faith is nothing other than an existential
modality’ (Russell 2011, 649) so that questions of the content of belief are irrelevant. While Heidegger objects
to the understanding of faith as merely cognitive assent to a set of propositions, stressing that ‘the genesis of
dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of Christian life experience’ (GA60, 112/PRL, 79),
this only means that ‘questions of content may not be understood detachedly’ (GA60, 115/PRL, 82). It does
not follow, for instance, that Heidegger eliminates Paul’s belief that Christ will actually return on some
tomorrow, as Merold Westphal alleges in criticism of Heidegger (Westphal 2001, 42). It means only that to
understand Paul’s faith, one needs to understand the experience of living towards this anticipated end, in a
condition of heightened anguish and total responsibility for oneself. Cf. Zoller 2011, 116.
 S. Sikka

traditions would have been available to him.3 Robert Bernasconi proposes that, in view
of his phenomenological aims which require a close study of factical life, Heidegger
likely saw no alternative for himself and his students but to ‘begin where we are’
(Bernasconi 2009, 211). The result, though, is that the very idea of religion that
Heidegger is assuming is culturally specific, and the shape of the phenomena addressed
in Heidegger’s articulation of the relation between phenomenology, theology and the
lived experience of faith is likewise culturally specific.
It is an especially poor fit with non-Abrahamic traditions. As John Hick points out in
the context of an argument for religious pluralism, the idea of faith is ‘more at home in
the Semitic than in [e.g.] the Indian family of traditions’ (Hick 1985, 29). On
Heidegger’s understanding of the concept, religious faith necessarily involves accep-
tance of a revealed creed, even if it also means more than that.4 Conceived in this way,
faith is not central to what have come to be distinguished as the major religions of India
and is even explicitly rejected by some—for instance, Buddhism.5 In fact, the under-
standing of religion that Heidegger employs, where it stands in a necessary tension with
philosophy as open questioning, is specific to Western history and does not properly
capture the nature of Asian traditions. Certainly, the reflective and analytic thought of
ancient and medieval India cannot be comprehended through such a divide between
‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ nor can much of Confucian, Taoist and East Asian Buddhist
thought. It may nonetheless be true that some or all of these traditions valorize forms of
experience, practice and insight that cannot be captured in concepts. But a distinction
between conceptual and other forms of understanding or wisdom is not equivalent to a
distinction between religion and philosophy or between faith and reason.
It might be argued that none of this truly counts as an objection to Heidegger’s
procedure, for in beginning with factical life, he fully recognizes the historicity of his
investigations. In that case, the exclusion of Asian traditions in Heidegger’s account of
religion might seem better warranted than a too hasty assimilation of non-Western ideas
and ways of life to these historically Western categories, especially given that Heideg-
ger does engage in dialogue with East Asian thought later in his career, without
describing it as either philosophy or religion. However, Heidegger also does name
Buddhism as a ‘positive religion’ in The Phenomenology of Religious Life (GA 60,
/PRL, 17). In any case, however one judges the reasons for Heidegger’s exclusion of
non-Western traditions in his analysis of religion, the outcome is that what he has to say
only applies properly to Christianity.
Even leaving this point aside, the objection has been raised against Heidegger’s
position that there is a danger in separating faith and reason so completely in the case of
any religion, including Christianity. Heidegger argues, in accord with the principles of
phenomenology, that the object of faith is presented only to the attitude of faith. In that
case, it cannot be scrutinized, or even properly understood, by those who do not relate
to it in the manner of faith. Ben Vedder justifiably complains that ‘one ends up here in a

3
That certainly includes Asian philosophical and religious traditions, given the substantial history of
engagement with these by German orientalists. See Marchand 2009.
4
See note 2.
5
The closest concept to ‘faith’ within Indian religious traditions is the idea of sraddha, but even in Vedic
contexts, including the orthodox schools that accept the authority of the Vedas, it does not mean quite mean
creedal belief. And in the contexts of Jainism, Buddhism and bhakti traditions, it does not connote acceptance
of divinely authorized texts at all. See Rao 1971; Sawai 1987; Sharma 1987; Davis 2006.
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

kind of subjectivist swamp . . . Reason as a kind of general authority of control seems to

disappear’ (Vedder 2007, 92).
In addition, while Heidegger’s rejection of the kind of theology and philosophy that
entirely volatilizes the content of religious experience may be fair, the reduction of
theology to an explication of such experience seems untrue to the way in which
religious people, or at least many religious people, actually relate to their beliefs. As
John Williams observes: ‘It is evident both historically and logically that faith needs
theology . . . Religious people have always sought reasons for their beliefs, since the
acceptance of a belief without sufficient reason is not faith but credulity . . .’ (Williams
1977, 157). It is a matter of fact that sometimes people do not find such reasons or are
struck by contrary evidence. Heidegger speaks of the necessity for faith to expose itself
to the possibility of unfaith, but he does not acknowledge the role of reasoning in this
exposure. People do sometimes change their religious beliefs as a result of reasoning
and evidence, in which arguments for and against the existence of God may play a role.
Heidegger’s analysis provides little basis for understanding how people lose their faith,
which we know they sometimes do, or what to make of such a shift. A phenomenology
that treats faith as if it were a self-contained and self-justifying sphere of experience,
wholly separate from the kind of reasoning that is the hallmark of philosophy, is
therefore mistaken even by its own criteria of validity: descriptive adequacy to the
lived experience of faith.
Does this mean that Heidegger’s validation of religious life and critique of common
evaluative approaches is fatally flawed and that one must return to classic philosophical
theology to provide a justification for belief? Benjamin Crowe reaches this conclusion
in Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion: Realism and Cultural Criticism (Crowe
2008). However, his argument follows a peculiar course. Crowe claims that Heidegger
is actually a ‘realist’ about religion, but that his realism ‘is semantic rather than
metaphysical’ (13). This is based on Crowe’s understanding of Heidegger as a cultural
critic who does not advance a philosophical position of his own. ‘Rather than making a
contribution to what he called the Bbusiness^ of philosophy’, Crowe argues,
‘[Heidegger’s] only real aspiration was to shake up the dominant cultural paradigms
of the twentieth century’ which ‘are all expressions of one fundamental perspective:
subjectivism’ (10). ‘Subjectivism’ is Heidegger’s name for the modern view that
human beings are the ground and source of all meaning. In the sphere of religion,
‘God’ then becomes—is reduced to being—‘the highest value’, where values are
human projections. But, in Crowe’s words, ‘the meaning of religious practices like
prayer, worship, social action, and theological reflection all depend upon a basic
response to an independent realm of meaning’ so that ‘the sense of religious life
embodies the fact that religious meaning is imparted or discovered, rather than created’
(59). It is the virtue of Heidegger’s account to have recognized this, Crowe thinks, and
this recognition is what makes Heidegger a ‘semantic’ realist.
There is something skewed in this analysis, though, and it emerges in Crowe’s
criticism of Heidegger, expressed in the following passage:

Religious meaning and value transcends subjectivity because it actually derives

from a personal deity that exists independently of the conditions of human
understanding. If this explanation is to be convincing, however, there must be
some positive apologetic. That is, there must be a case made for the plausibility of
 S. Sikka

the religious hypothesis . . . Heidegger’s debunking of the anti-realist fruits of the

‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ can play an important role in the overall case for
theism. But, beyond that, Heidegger’s suspicions of rational apologetic impede
his ability to mount a rational case for theism. (Crowe 2008, 141-42).

Apart from the fact that not all religion involves belief in a ‘personal deity’, this
criticism reduces the preceding account of Heidegger on religious ‘meaning’ to trivi-
ality. For it amounts to saying that religious believers believe that there is a transcendent
source of meaning, and non-believers who give subjectivist accounts of religion do not.
Heidegger provides a good description of what religious life is like for those who
believe, but ‘rational apologetic’ is required to justify the beliefs themselves. In that
case, though, what is the point of engaging with Heidegger on this issue? After all,
surely, we already knew that people who believe in God do in fact believe in God.
Those who argue instead that God is a projection—e.g. of a given community’s highest
values—are not mistaken in their understanding of religious belief. They are simply
offering an alternative view, which they know full well contradicts the self-
understanding of believers. If Heidegger’s ‘critique’ of subjectivism amounts to saying
no more than that religious believers do not view God as a subjective projection or as a
human value, it has little merit.
I think, however, that Crowe underestimates the force of this critique, which
involves more than merely unearthing the presuppositions of our age. He also fails to
consider some of the implications of Heidegger’s phenomenological commitments, as
they apply to phenomenology of religion. I want next to explore these issues by
examining the argumentative content of Heidegger’s reflections on the holy, in con-
nection with the question about the relation between faith and philosophy.

The Holy and Reason

Heidegger had at one point read with interest Rudolf Otto’s work, Das Heilige, The
Holy, first published in 1917. The work was subtitled: On the Irrational in the Idea of
the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. That Heidegger found this subtitle prob-
lematic is apparent from the following remark in his lecture course, Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Religion (Winter Semester 1920-21):

It is . . . customary today to work with the categorical opposition of rational and

irrational. Today’s philosophy of religion is proud of its category of the irrational
and, with it, considers the access to religiosity secured. But with these two
concepts nothing is said, as long as one does not know the meaning of rational.
(GA 60, 79/PRL, 54).

And the meaning of ‘rational’, Heidegger points out, is far from clear. At the same
time, in some sketches for a lecture course called The Philosophical Foundations of
Medieval Mysticism, which was to have been given in 1918–1919 but was never held,
Heidegger engages positively with the idea of the holy, saying: ‘the holy may not be
made into a problem as theoretical—also not an irrational theoretical—noema, but
rather as correlate of the act-character of Bfaith,^ which itself is to be interpreted only
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

from out of the fundamentally essential experiential context of historical consciousness’

(GA 60, 333/PRL, 252).
The primary religion determining Heidegger’s idea of the holy here is once more
Christianity. The ‘holy’ is given to ‘faith’, and the emphasis on ‘historical conscious-
ness’ both recognizes the culturally embedded character of ‘faith’ and makes awareness
of historicality central to it in a way that it is not in some other religious traditions.
There is nonetheless a continuity with Otto, consisting in the recognition that the holy is
a unique category of experience, uncovered through a certain act-character—or, to use
the language of Being and Time, a certain ‘way of being towards’—on the part of the
one who uncovers.
In a sense, then, Heidegger is making a move common among defenders of faith,
drawing a contrast between faith and reason and claiming that faith has its own integrity
as a means of grasping some dimension of truth. At the same time, he problematizes the
association of faith, whose object-correlate is the holy, with irrationality, as this
judgement requires an analysis of what we mean by ‘rational’. Heidegger does not
provide such an analysis in his early lectures, but a great deal of his later oeuvre is
concerned with precisely this theme. His reflections on the various historical incarna-
tions of reason—as logos, ratio, Vernunft—in these later writings suggest that what we
call ‘reason’ is not some easily definable freestanding universal capacity. The term
‘reason’ has its own historical lineage and cultural specificity, so that one should be not
be too quick to draw facile oppositions between the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’. In
that case, before judging that the noesis discovering the holy is ‘irrational’, we need to
consider what is being defined as ‘rational’ when this judgement is made, and that
question is a historical one.
According to Heidegger’s historical analyses of the Western destiny of ‘reason’, the
term comes to mean the calculating representation of objects, expressed paradigmati-
cally in the language of mathematics, of a sort that yields certainty and control over the
field of knowledge. The way of being that discovers the holy neither seeks nor obtains
such certainty and control, and what it experiences cannot be made into an object. In
that specific historicized sense, it can be described as ‘irrational’, and from the
perspective of modern reason will appear to be unscientific and subjective. But how
do these criteria get established, and what justifies their priority in determining truth? In
¶69 of Being and Time, Heidegger provides a phenomenological description of the way
in which the objects of science come to be constituted. This is, on Heidegger’s account,
a process whereby the world we encounter through our everyday concerns and projects
is emptied of significance, flattened out, as it were, to become a collection of mere
things, objects present at hand. These, ‘the aggregate of the present-at-hand’, are then
divided into various regions, which are in turn investigated by the different sciences,
employing concepts appropriate to the kind of being that these entities manifest. In
scientific investigation, we do not understand things on the basis of a projection of
practical ends, as tools suitable to accomplish this or that goal. Rather, science involves
projection of a different kind. In the case of the natural sciences, the condition for the
possibility of the emergence of the kinds of objects they study is the mathematical
projection of nature. ‘Only Bin the light^ of a Nature which has been projected in this
fashion can anything like a Bfact^ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and
delimited in terms of this projection’ (BT, 362). Entities are always discovered only
through a prior projection of their being, through some set of concepts or some
 S. Sikka

understanding that anticipates what is to be encountered. Science projects, ‘frees’ or

illumines the being or character of what-is in a particular manner. Natural science (the
model is clearly physics) does so by projecting in advance a particular conception of
‘nature’, a mathematical one, involving one among many possible ways of revealing
the ‘being of beings’, the nature, in a broader sense, of things, in the broadest sense of
whatever is in any way.
After Being and Time, Heidegger increasingly focuses on the historical
construction of this projection and comes to see modern science as involving
not only mathematization, which was known to the Greeks as well, but a
specific conception of the field of nature, inaugurated by Newton and Galileo.
Galileo, he points out in a 1933/34 lecture course, ‘first laid down what should
belong to the essence of nature, in that he approached it as the spatiotemporal
totality of the motion of mass-points’ (GA 36/37, 162/BTr, 126). This is a
‘reaching ahead into actuality’ prior to experimentation and mathematics (GA
36/37, 162/BTr, 126). In What is a Thing?, Heidegger traces the shift from the
Aristotelian conception of nature to the modern one projected by Galileo and
Newton and describes the latter as follows:

All bodies are alike. No motion is special. Every place is like every other, each
moment like any other. Every force becomes determinable only by the change of
motion which it causes – this change in motion being understood as a change of
place. All determinations of bodies have one basic blueprint (Grundriss), accord-
ing to which the natural process is nothing but the space-time determination of the
motion of points of mass. (GA41, 92/WT, 91).

On Heidegger’s analysis, this projection of nature, which is grounded in a

thematization of present-at-hand objects and their motions, is not suited to capture
every dimension of being. It cannot, for instance, properly describe the spatiality and
temporality of our own being-in-the-world. There is no implication that this way of
constituting the being of beings is per se a falsification; only, it should not be over-
extended to cover regions of being to which it is inappropriate. While Heidegger’s
analysis of projection is indebted to Kant, he does not take over Kant’s distinction
between phenomena and noumena.6
Consequently, Heidegger’s account does not assume that the projections on the basis
of which entities are understood in one way or another are merely ‘subjective’ nor does
he relegate the entities thereby constituted to the realm of phenomena, bearing we know
not what relation to things in themselves. Rather, Being and Time consistently uses, in
relation to various forms of human understanding (including scientific understanding),
language suggesting illumination, uncovering, discovering and revealing. The implicit
critique in Being and Time of the projection of the being of beings proper to physics in
particular does not seek to undermine the legitimacy and the claims to truth within this
province of knowledge but only to provide an analysis that sets those claims within
what Heidegger believes are their proper limits. The mathematical projection of nature,
in its specifically modern variation, involves a particular way of disclosing what things

6
The analysis of ‘The Concept of Phenomenon’ in BT, ¶7 (pp. 28–31) calls into question the phenomeno-
logical basis for this distinction.
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

are. There is no warrant for the supposition that the projection of nature that
forms the foundation of modern science is privileged in capturing the whole
truth about what-is, such that every other interpretation must either be reducible
to its terms or be considered, at best, merely ‘subjective’, where that means not
really real. Heidegger’s point, then, concerns the metaphysics of modern natural
science, not the truth, in an ordinary sense, of well-founded scientific claims,
which Heidegger does not dispute.
This point, first raised in Being and Time, forms the main theme of later essays like
‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and ‘Science and Reflection’, which argue that
modern science is based on a certain decision about the being of beings. That decision
determines in advance what will count as real on the basis of specific criteria,
embedded in the idea of nature as a ‘calculable coherence of forces’ (TK, 21/QCT,
21). What is real is taken to be what can be mathematically described in terms of this
model. In ‘Science and Reflection’, Heidegger writes:

An oft-cited statement of Max Planck reads: ‘That is real which can be mea-
sured.’ This means that the decision about what may pass in science, in this case
in physics, for assured knowledge rests with the measurability supplied in the
objectness of nature and, in keeping with that measurability, in the possibilities
inherent in the measuring procedure. (VA, 51-52/QCT, 169).

While Heidegger does not explicitly pose the question, his analysis leads one
to ask whether any non-circular argument can be given for the claim that the
real is only what can be measured or that being is exclusively what can be
represented as object. Heidegger does not deny we can obtain a certain kind of
understanding, what we have come to think of purely as ‘knowledge’, only
through such representation and through the methodology of science. But this is
virtually a tautological claim. Only through the method and concepts of science,
can we, for instance, perform repeatable experiments under controlled condi-
tions of the sort that are proper to science and obtain precise mathematical
results that sometimes enable us to re-order and re-organize the objective world
through technology. Heidegger denies, however, that forms of disclosure, ways
in which we experience the world, that do not enable us to do precisely this, or
do not enable us to represent as an object what we have experienced, are
necessarily false or merely subjective, where the latter judgement involves the
view that the subjective is merely apparent as opposed to true. Again, his
analysis raises the question of what argument can be given in favour of this
view that does not already presuppose what it needs to demonstrate.
Heidegger’s analysis also suggests that there is no good reason, and in fact,
it is unreasonable, to suppose that humanity is transposed into the midst of
things so as to impose upon the world ‘ideas’ that are foreign to it, as if we
were dropped into being as a whole from somewhere else (where could that
be?), rather than arising among entities as an entity of special kind: namely,
one through which the truth of what-is comes to light. On Heidegger’s account,
what is special about Dasein, the entity that I myself am, is that it has a
relation to being (BT, 12), an ability to distance itself from itself and from
what is within the world so as to apprehend the being of what-is, of itself and
 S. Sikka

of the things that surround it. 7 Why should one think otherwise? To put the
matter in non-Heideggerian language, what justifies the conclusion that human
beings are cut off from reality to begin with, rather than being products of the
same nature that courses through everything else, but that becomes self-
reflexive at this site? If we are such products, though, we do not have good
grounds to dismiss a priori the possibility that the experience of the holy
genuinely discloses a dimension of being and so constitutes a form of access
to truth. To claim that this form of access is not ‘scientific’, and that its objects
are not quantitatively measurable, is to beg the question entirely. For this
objection assumes what needs to demonstrated: namely, that quantitative mea-
surability is the one and only valid criterion for discriminating what counts as
true being, a premise for which, again, no non-circular argument can be given.
There is also a pragmatic dimension to Heidegger’s reflections on the modern
condition, which suggest that the sense of the holy is absent in the modern age due
to a way of being on our part that does not allow it to appear. This way of being on our
part, however, is in turn linked to a set of presuppositions about being and humanity
that have come to predominate in the modern West but now inform the modern age as a
global one. These are indeed the presuppositions that constitute subjectivism, and
Crowe is right to say that ‘the understanding of being as Bholy^ is meant to constitute
an alternative to modern subjectivism, for which meaning is a Bproduct^ of human
subjectivity’ (Crowe 2008, 117). But Heidegger is not merely ‘exposing’ these presup-
positions (Crowe 2008, 29); he is also challenging this constellation of metaphysical
and epistemological assumptions about the nature of human understanding in its
relation to what-is. Heidegger challenges, for instance, the assumption that we are
‘subjects’ standing over against a reality which we know only as an object through the
security and clarity of conceptual representation. He challenges also the assumption
that such representation constitutes the only valid means of grasping what is true and
that the really real is exclusively what can be calculated with certainty and captured,
ideally, in the language of mathematics.
Thus, one point Heidegger makes, as Crowe and other scholars have noted, is indeed
that the approach to reality whereby we set ourselves up as calculating subjects seeking
to capture truth through representational frameworks, or to order the objective world to
fit our wants and needs, blocks the experience of the holy. But another point, which
rests on an epistemological argument, is that we need to question the supposition that
this approach constitutes the only means of right knowing. Or, to put the matter
differently, if this is what constitutes ‘knowing’,8 there may nonetheless be other modes
of revealing the truth of being, ones that, for instance, apprehend aspects that elude
calculating representation. The experience of the holy could be one such mode. At
least, this possibility should not be ruled out merely on the basis of a set of epistemo-
logical and metaphysical assumptions (those that constitute ‘subjectivism’) which are
themselves open to question, where these assumptions are fundamental to the meaning
of ‘reason’ at a particular historical juncture.
7
On this point, I argue elsewhere that there is a strong similarity between Heidegger’s view of the basis of
human understanding, which in turn enables the distinctively human capacity for language, and Herder’s
notion of Besonnenheit, or ‘reflectivity’. See Sikka 2011, 185-89.
8
Being and Time describes ‘knowing’ as ‘a founded mode of being-in’, interpreting it as a specific form of
understanding rather than as understanding in general (BT, 59).
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

We should notice, too, that in the later works where modern subjectivism becomes
an issue, Heidegger no longer describes the holy as the correlate of faith, as he had in
his early lectures on the phenomenology of religion. The earlier account, with its
exclusive orientation towards Christianity, left no room for ideas of the holy within
religious traditions not centred on the concept of faith, let alone for a sense of the holy
that might not be situated within any particular religious tradition. In works like ‘What
are Poets for?’, by contrast, the question is not that of Christian faith and its object but
of the holy as the track towards the godhead, where staying on this track is one of the
tasks of the poet ‘in a destitute time’ (Hw, 266–68/PLT, 92–94). In this time:

Not only have the gods and god fled, but the divine radiance has become
extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute
time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it
can no longer discern the default of God as a default. (Hw, 265/PLT, 91).

One is reminded here of Max Weber’s claims about the disenchantment of the world,
and some might hear in such remarks a nostalgia for childhood fantasies we have
outgrown with the progress of knowledge. Heidegger’s point, however, is not that due
to science we have ceased to believe in God and need to return to such belief. It is rather
that, due to the predominance of the modern world-view I have been describing, which
involves at the same time a certain conception of ourselves, we have lost the sense of
the holy. Heidegger sees that sense as forming the basis, the phenomenological ground,
for ideas of God and gods, whether we interpret these as literally true, or as symbols
and metaphors, or as imaginative stories.
Thus, what remains away now is the disclosure of that dimension of being which in
the ‘Letter on Humanism’ Heidegger had described as determining the signification of
‘God’:

Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from
the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of
the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify.
(GA 9, 351/BW, 253).

The question of God can be posed only within the dimension of the holy, and that
dimension remains closed in the modern epoch with its distorted relation to being (GA
9, 351/BW, 253). The need of this destitute time, then, in which the gods have fled and
only traces of the holy remain, is to prepare for a reversal of the subjectivist paradigm
within which the holy cannot appear. The poet’s role here is ‘to attend, singing, to the
trace of the fugitive gods’, to utter the holy in the time of the world’s night (Hw, 266/
PLT, 92). Poetry may register what is distressing and awry in the present age, pointing
to what has been lost but might somehow be retrieved. This task requires a creative
struggle with language, the provenance of poetry, because only what accords with the
predominant worldview of the age is easy to say and easy to understand, finding a
ready language of utterance. It is easy to say, for instance, that through modern science
and technology, we are gaining greater and greater mastery over nature, thereby
securing the knowledge and resources required to satisfy our preferences, and that
surely the greater our capacity to do this, the happier we will be. It is also easy to say
 S. Sikka

that ‘mystical’ experiences, like the experience of the holy, are merely subjective, and
do not tell us anything about the objective world.
The philosopher’s neighbouring but distinct task is to think critically about the basic
presuppositions that make such statements easy, a matter of common sense, and
alternatives difficult to imagine. Heidegger engages in this task through analyses of
metaphysical concepts within philosophical texts, interpreting these as sites where a
cultural epoch’s fundamental view of being—its assumptions about reality, knowledge
and truth—get articulated. As Iain Thompson points out:

Heidegger’s deconstruction presupposes that metaphysics is not simply the

esoteric concern of philosophers isolated in their ivory towers, but that, on the
contrary, ‘Metaphysics grounds an age’ . . . Heidegger’s claim is that by giving
shape to our historical understanding of ‘what is’, metaphysics determines the
most basic presuppositions of what anything is, including ourselves. (Thomson
2000, 298)

Heidegger also reflects on poetic utterances that speak in their own way about the
character of the present in relation to the past, gesturing towards possibilities for
change. The hope is that these efforts can once again clear space for the holy, which
in turn would allow a questioning appraisal of what we might mean by ‘God’.
I have argued so far that Heidegger provides an argument against epistemological
and ontological positions which would rule out the possible veridicality of experiences
like the ones Otto describes in The Idea of the Holy, on the grounds that such
experiences are merely subjective and tell us nothing about reality. At the same time,
though, there also seem to be direct parallels between the language Heidegger applies
to being and language applied to God by certain thinkers whose works he knew, such as
Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. This observation forms the starting point for analyses
like those of Caputo and Macquarrie. While Caputo concludes that there is only a
structural analogy between theological terms and Heidegger’s phenomenological ones,
rather than any relation of identity between the terms themselves (Caputo 1978, 143–
44), Macquarrie suggests a deeper relation (Macquarrie 1984, 163–67). In the last part
of my analysis, I revisit this vexed question of the relation between what Heidegger
calls ‘being’ and the possible meanings of ‘God’, proposing that there is a more than
merely analogical relation between these terms. Consequently, there is a sense in which
Heidegger produces not only a negative argument against subjectivism and its exclu-
sion of the holy as a sign of ‘God’ but also a positive argument for the existence of
God.

Being and God

Heidegger’s explicit statements about the relation between being (in his usage of the
term) and God are clear enough. He emphatically rules out any attempt to equate the
two, writing, in the ‘Letter on Humanism’: ‘Yet Being—what is Being? It is It itself.
The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and to say it. BBeing^—that
is not God and not a cosmic ground’ (GA 9, 331/BW, 234). We could start by
considering in what respects, for Heidegger, being is decidedly not God. For one thing,
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

God is typically conceived as an entity, the highest entity, a personal being

responsible for the creation of whatever there is in the world. Alternatively, in
some other theologies, God is, if not personal and not exactly an entity, at least a
kind of ‘cosmic ground’, as Heidegger puts it, an ever-present constant source
from which particular beings emerge and into which they eventually submerge
themselves. What Heidegger refers to as ‘being’, on the other hand, is not any sort
of entity, not a thing or person, nor is it an underlying ever-present ground, an
unchanging substratum of reality. It is not, for instance, analogous to a formless
clay out of which clay vessels are made, as proposed in the Chandogya Upani-
shad.9 We are tempted to imagine something like this, Heidegger suggests. We are
tempted to think, everything ‘has’ being, so being is like the stuff out of which all
these things are made, mental and material things alike. But this is a bad picture. It
takes its orientation from an examination of a particular facet of objects as they
present themselves to us in our experience. It then applies categories and a way of
schematizing abstracted from our observation of objects to being as such, imag-
ining the latter as a sort of universal substance. That is not what Heidegger means
by ‘being’.
So what does he mean? ‘Being’ is that which is named—and therefore
interpreted—within the history of Western metaphysics as essence, existence,
reality, substance, subjectivity, spirit and will to power. It is what Aristotle
interpreted as physis, nature, and described using terms like kinesis, dynamis,
energeia, telos (‘end’) and aitia (‘causes’ or ‘explanations’). That cannot be
‘God’, obviously, understood as a person or entity. It is, rather, the ‘how’ and
‘what’ of things. On one common approach within philosophy of religion, the
question of God is the question of whether there exists a being who is
responsible for this ‘how’ and ‘what’. This would also mean a being who
governs the becoming of the whole of being, its movement, change and
development, including the way it takes shape with our participation, through
our knowing and making and cultivating. That is an essential component of the
‘rational apologetics’ that Crowe has in mind as necessary for establishing the
reality of God, which he takes to mean ‘a personal deity that exists indepen-
dently of the conditions of human understanding’ (Crowe 2008, 141).

9
‘Just as through one lump of clay everything made of clay is known, so difference of shape is just name,
dependent on speech: Bclay^ is the only reality’ (vi.1, Upanishads 2003, 170). To be sure, this is only
presented as an analogy, and Sankara writes, ‘just because the gross earth and other things are cited by way of
example, it does not follow . . . that the source of all things, that is exemplified, is postulated to be gross’
(Brahma-sutra-bhasya, I.ii.21; Sankara 1965, 142). But Heidegger’s point is that such pictures of true being
are problematic. In fact, given the analysis of Zeug, equipment or tools, in Being and Time (BT, ¶14-15) he
would not even accept the literal claim on which the analogy is based, i.e. that ‘difference of shape is just a
name’ and that in the case of artifacts formed out of a given material, the material is the ‘only reality’. See, for
example, BT, 101, where he says of tools:

The kind of being which belongs to these entities is readiness-to-hand. But this characteristic is not to
be understood as merely a way of taking them, as if we were talking such ‘aspects’ into the ‘entities
which we proximally encounter, or as if some world-stuff which is proximally present-at-hand in itself
were ‘given subjective colouring’ in this way . . . Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they
are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially.^
 S. Sikka

Heidegger deliberately avoids such apologetics, for a number of reasons. One is that
such an apologetic lies outside the proper province of philosophy as he conceives of it.
‘Thinking’, he writes, ‘can be theistic as little as atheistic . . . Not, however, because of an
indifferent attitude, but out of respect for the boundaries that have been set for thinking as
such’ (GA9, 352/BW, 254). The stricture applies especially to phenomenology, which
involves rigorous reflection on what appears, how it appears and to whom it appears,
seeking to analyse the essential structures of these elements through a gaze that is
constantly struggling to free itself from the biases of inherited theories and presupposi-
tions. Heidegger’s historical deconstructions of basic philosophical concepts seem like a
methodological switch to genealogy, but they are actually part of this phenomenological
project. He comes to see that one cannot in practice bracket ‘theories’ and ‘assumptions’
through a mental act, thereby leaping into an unmediated beholding of the thing itself.
Rather, phenomenology has to make visible the experiential roots of the basic concepts
that inevitably shape the investigator’s orientation, priorities and ways of understanding
the subject matter he or she is approaching, and that requires historical analysis.
What philosophy as phenomenology never does, however, is tell stories (BT, 26).
Heidegger’s account suggests that Western philosophy has been led astray by repeat-
edly telling one such story, and a poor one at that: the ontotheological story which
interprets real being as constant presence, and then posits a being who is the highest
and most real, i.e. God, who somehow imparts being to the remainder of what-is. On
this story, God is the highest and most real being and at the same time precisely a
cosmic ground. Heidegger explicitly tries to free both God and being from their
entanglement in this story. There are many fine and detailed analyses of Heidegger
on ontotheology (e.g. Thomson 2000; 2005), and I will not repeat their findings here.
Most scholars addressing this theme have accepted Heidegger’s critique of the
ontotheological picture, which he takes to be foundational for Western metaphysics
and metaphysical theology, as well as his insistence on the radical separateness of the
concepts of being and God. Acknowledging that there are problems with ontotheology,
however, I want to press a little further into this question of the relation between God
and being, without immediately granting Heidegger’s own assessment of what the
relation between these terms has been and should be.
It is a historical fact that the terms ‘God’ and ‘being’ have at times been identified by
certain philosophers and theologians. In the West, these are mainly thinkers who, under
the inspiration of Neoplatonism, developed a monistic metaphysics and an accompa-
nying theology in which ‘God’ is the immanent source of the world rather than being
an individual entity separate from the world. John Macquarrie’s In Search of Deity: An
Essay in Dialectical Theism, the published version of the Gifford Lectures Macquarrie
delivered in 1983–84, traces this line of thought in developing its own conception of
God as simultaneously immanent and transcendent, proposed as an alternative to the
God of classical theism. On Macquarrie’s analysis, the past representatives of this
alternative tradition include Plotinus, John Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel,
Whitehead—and Heidegger. In relation to Heidegger, Macquarrie argues that what
Heidegger calls ‘being’ is indeed a candidate for ‘God’, understood not as ‘a supreme
being in the onto-theological or metaphysical sense’ (Macquarrie 1984, 163) but as the
‘event’ which ‘gives’ being, and gives itself to humanity in the process of its own
disclosure (Macquarrie 1984, 167). This ‘original event of donation’, Macquarrie
claims, is not ‘beyond’ being in every sense of the term ‘being’. It is beyond the things
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

that are, but if being is itself understood verbally, as ‘an event rather than a substance’,
as being, the event is being itself (Macquarrie 1984, 167). Within this philosophical
theology, being is not an underlying substance, nor is God an entity. Rather, both are
understood in terms of the process whereby entities come to be and to be disclosed,
where disclosure (human understanding) is also an event ‘within’ being. Macquarrie
suggests that such a conception brings Heidegger close to Paul Tillich, ‘who probably
derived his concept of being from Heidegger in the first place’ (Macquarrie 1984, 163).
Such positions in turn have parallels within Asian philosophy, for instance in the
writings of the Indian non-dualist philosopher, Sankara. Rudolf Otto drew comparisons
between Eckhart and Sankara, in work of which Heidegger was very likely aware (see
May 1996, 97), favouring Eckhart for having a ‘dynamic’ conception of God, as
opposed to the ‘static’ conception that he sees in Sankara’s thought and in the Indian
world generally (Otto 1925, 330). Given the apparent similarities between Heidegger
and Eckhart, and between Eckhart and Sankara, it is unsurprising that scholars have
also spotted correspondences between Heidegger and the kind of position Sankara
develops (Mehta 1987; Correya 2003; Grimes 2007). The guiding intuition here is that
there might be affinities between the Advaita Vedanta notion of absolute reality as
Brahman, which Sankara does sometimes understand as ‘God’ (Isvar) but which does
not have the form of an entity, and what Heidegger understands as ‘being’ or the
‘event’. This is plausible, for while Heidegger’s understanding of being is indeed
dynamic, it is actually not so clear that Sankara’s understanding of Brahman is as
static as Otto, for one, supposed. It should also be noted in this context that Sankara
hardly exemplifies Indian philosophy as a whole, and that even within the ‘school’ of
Vedanta, there are competing positions. Some of these strongly affirm the real becom-
ing of the world as an emanation of Brahman, while nonetheless maintaining a relation
of qualified identity between these two dimensions of reality.10
There are, I think, elements in Heidegger’s thought that warrant describing it as also
endorsing a form of monism. By this, I do not mean that Heidegger thinks there is in
truth only one thing. He would surely raise suspicious questions about the criteria for
what it means to be on which such a metaphysical thesis could be based. However, to
put the matter crudely for a moment, it is tempting to understand what Heidegger calls
‘being’ as a ‘one’ of some sort that differentiates itself into many, and thus as like the
‘one’ of Plotinus or the Brahman of Sankara or the ‘being’ (aka God) of Eckhart,
though in Heidegger’s case without denying or attributing any ‘lesser’ being to the
many. It is not that being is a ‘stuff’ out of which things are made. This is for Heidegger
a bad picture, as already noted. But in many of Heidegger’s reflections—on things, on
nature, on ancient Greek philosophers, on the sacred—being is, to use Heidegger’s own
terminology, what comes to presence in all that is.11 ‘Being’ names, for Heidegger, the
10
See Nicholson 2010 for a historical account of different positions on this issue among individual Indian
thinkers.
11
John Cooper therefore labels Heidegger a ‘dynamic panentheist’, offering a brief survey of similar
interpretations stressing Heidegger’s debt to Neoplatonism, such as that of John Macquarrie (Cooper 2006,
215-217). At the same time, with reference to the work of Caputo, Cooper notes that Heidegger speaks of the
holy as the sphere of religion ‘but he says little more because he believes the task of philosophy is to ponder
Being, not to judge the claims of religion or the reality of God’ (Cooper 2006, 216). Without some clarification
of the relation between God and being, however, terms like ‘panentheism’ remain obscure and debatable,
presupposing an equation between ‘God’ and what Heidegger calls ‘being’ that Caputo’s interpretation, for
one, does not endorse (see Caputo 1978, 1982).
 S. Sikka

process of coming to presence, of coming into being and passing away. It is, at the same
time, the order governing this coming to be and passing away. This process ‘includes’
all that is, all natural things like blades of grass and trees and deer and brooks. It
includes humanity too, as an entity whose distinctiveness consists in being able to
apprehend being and thus bring entities to appearance through naming and work,
language and artifacts, where this is our ‘destiny’ as the kind of entity we are. This is
why Heidegger describes man as ‘the shepherd of being’, ‘whose dignity consists in
being called by being itself into the preservation of being’s truth’ (GA9, 342/BW, 245).
Modern subjectivism understands our grasp of reality as a function of human projec-
tion, whereas Heidegger writes: ‘What throws in projection is not man but being itself,
which sends man into the ek-sistence of Da-sein that is his essence’ [Das Werfende im
Entwerfen ist nicht der Mensch, sondern das Sein selbst, das den Menschen in die ek-
sistenz des Da-seins als sein Wesen schickt (GA9, 337/BW, 241).
One might also be reminded in this context of Spinoza’s equation of being, nature
and God, drawn within a monistic metaphysics positing one ‘substance’ that we
apprehend under two attributes, mind and matter. Individual entities are, for Spinoza,
modes of this substance. We are a special kind of mode in that we are capable of a self-
reflexive understanding of being or nature or substance or God. Yet there is, prima
facie, an important disanalogy between that picture and Heidegger’s understanding of
being. Spinoza stands within Heidegger’s ‘history of being’ insofar as he, as a
metaphysician, imagines being/nature/God as something ‘standing underneath’—the
literal meaning of the term ‘substance’.12 The representation of being as an underlying
constantly present actuality is precisely what Heidegger criticizes as ontotheology. 13
Heidegger’s analysis of Aristotle, which is critical but also appreciative, is helpful in
making clear the nature of his claims on this point. In an essay on Aristotle’s concept of
physis, usually translated into English as ‘nature’, Heidegger notes that for Aristotle
kinesis, movement, is decisive for the essence of physis (GA9, 243/P, 187). He observes
also that Aristotle sees physis as ‘arche, i.e. the origin and ordering of movedness and
rest’ (GA9, 247/P, 189) for those things that have the principle of their motion (meaning
all change of any sort) within themselves. Furthermore, ‘for the Greeks movement as a
mode of being has the character of emerging into presencing’ (GA9, 250/P, 191). In
other words, all that is by nature is for Aristotle in motion—changing, developing,
passing away—and is governed by a principle that belongs to physis. Physis, therefore,
‘is the origin and ordering (arche) of the movedness of something that moves of itself’
(GA9, 226/P, 203). Heidegger goes on in this essay to relate human making or craft to
the activity of physis, but I will not follow him in that analysis here.
Instead, I want to consider Heidegger’s critique of Aristotle as a member of the
ontotheological tradition, in relation to some further philosophical moves made by
Aristotle. These are moves that take Aristotle towards the idea of the unmoved mover,
in an argument later picked up by Aquinas in his formulation of three of the five ways

12
I assume this would be Heidegger’s position, in response to the question Bernasconi poses: ‘did Spinoza fail
to find a place in the history of Being simply because his philosophy was an unimportant variation on
Cartesianism or because there was something in his thought that resisted a Heideggerian reading?’ (Bernasconi
1995, 336)
13
Lorenz Puntel completely misses this point when he claims that Heidegger ignored Aquinas’ conception of
God as ipsum esse per se subsistens (Puntel 2011, 93). In fact, this conception is a perfect illustration of the
target of Heidegger’s critique, to which Puntel is largely tone deaf.
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

of demonstrating the existence of God, which collectively become known as versions

of the cosmological argument. Aristotle argues both in the Physics and in the Meta-
physics that the becoming we observe in nature (physis) has to have an ultimate source,
a fundamental moving principle that imparts motion (change, growth, development) to
the things that move, but is not itself moved (Physics 8 [Aristotle 1970]; Metaphysics
12 [Aristotle 1980]). This is the final explanation for the order and becoming of things,
and it is what Aristotle calls the prime mover. The latter is therefore the ultimate arche
and aition of being as essentially characterized by kinesis. But—and this is the part
Heidegger finds most problematic—with respect to the modalities of being, Aristotle
conceives of energeia, commonly translated as ‘actuality’, as both higher than and prior
to dynamis, commonly translated as ‘potentiality’ (Metaphysics 9.8 [Aristotle 1980]).
Within Aristotle’s metaphysics, natural becoming involves an actualization of potenti-
ality, but the potentiality can only be given in the first place by something already
actual. Semen and seeds become men and plants, but actual men and plants are
necessarily prior to semen and seeds and impart to them the potentiality they contain
to develop in the way that they do (Metaphysics 9.8, 1049b–1050c [Aristotle 1980]).
This thought is then applied to the whole of being by Aristotle, so that all motion, all
perfecting of things, has to be brought about by that which is already actual and perfect,
thoroughly done, as it were, or complete. This leads Aristotle to claim that the prime
mover of physis as a whole is perfect ‘actuality’ (Metaphysics 12.6 [Aristotle 1980]), a
being whose essence is energeia, an idea picked up by Aquinas in his arguments from
motion, change and contingency.
Heidegger, on the other hand, says in the introduction to Being and Time that ‘higher
than actuality stands possibility’ (BT, 38). He is speaking in this sentence of the possibilities
of phenomenology, but the statement articulates a fundamental principle with much broader
implications for the work that follows, in which Dasein, the entity that I myself am, is
defined as a ‘potentiality-for-being’. While as ‘a modal category of presence-at-hand’,
possibility is on an ontologically lower level than actuality and necessity, Heidegger writes,
it is ‘the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized
ontologically’ (BT 183). This claim is connected with the phenomenon of human freedom.
Dasein is disclosed to itself as an ability to be this or that; it projects possibilities of its own
being and chooses between them. Who it comes to be is up to it in this respect, for the
content of its actual life is a function of its choosing some possibilities over others and
deciding to realize them, to the extent of its capability and within the confines of the
situation into which it is thrown. Possibility is higher than actuality in this context because
the projection of possibility grounds actualization, preceding and enabling it.
Given Heidegger’s analysis of possibility here and in later works, Richard Kearney
connects this theme with the idea of God, proposing that ‘some rapport might exist
between the Bpossibilizing power of Being^’ and the idea of God as possibility
formulated by theologians like Nicholas of Cusa (Kearney 2004, 137). Kearney also
draws on Heidegger and other modern philosophers to develop the idea of ‘the God
who may be’, where this is ‘a God who possibilizes our world from out of the future,
from the hoped-for eschaton which several religious traditions have promised will one
day come’ (Kearney 2001, 1). If, however, this God is not a substance, not an entity that
is and gives rise to all things, then how is this possibility or potentiality to be
understood in relation to the question of the existence of God? It is all very well to
say that God is a hoped for end, but why should anyone believe this end is anything
 S. Sikka

more than a projected fiction, and what is its relation to the actuality it is said to enable?
Is it just that we posit God as a kind of ideal towards which we strive?14
One way of approaching this question is to consider the implications of
Heidegger’s analysis of possibility in relation to Aristotle’s argument for the
prime mover, who also, we might note, ‘possibilizes from out of the future’ in
the form of a ‘final cause’. Catriona Hanley takes up this question in Being and
God in Aristotle and Heidegger: The Role of Method in Thinking the Infinite
(2000). She notes that, for Heidegger, Dasein is essentially finite, always
lacking in one way or another and aware of this lack. That very awareness
demonstrates a relation to the idea of perfection, the idea of the infinite, which
would not be lacking in any respect. On the basis of this phenomenological
observation, Hanley concludes: ‘I suggest that there are phenomenological
grounds to suppose that finitude and human mortality are not final phenomena
. . . There is a prior infinite givenness which precedes and follows upon
Dasein’s being in the world, and which is a precondition for Dasein’s experi-
ence of gratitude . . .’ (Hanley 2000, 191).
In formulating her argument, Hanley isolates some points that I also want to
highlight, but to develop in a different direction. First, there is the question of the
difference between Heidegger and Aristotle in their views on the relation between
actuality and potentiality, with its implications for the finite and the infinite. It is
essential to note that in his 1939 lecture course on the Aristotle’s concept of physis,
from which I cited above, Heidegger takes issue with the translation of energeia as
actualitas, and with the interpretation of Aristotle as having stated that ‘actuality is
prior to potentiality’ (GA9, 286/P, 218). On Heidegger’s reading, what Aristotle means
in the sentence commonly translated in this manner, rather, is that ‘energeia more
originally fulfills what pure presencing is insofar as it means a having-itself-in-the-
work-and-within-the-end that has left behind the entire Bnot yet^ of appropriateness for
(Eignung zu). . ., or better, has precisely brought forth along with it into the realization
of the finite, fulfilled (voll-‘endenten’) appearance’ (GA9, 287/P, 219). This admittedly
rather cryptic rendering is glossed by J.L. Mehta in the following way:

Energeia in Aristotle means, according to Heidegger, coming or being brought

into unhiddenness and presence and enduring so in an accomplished piece of
work, a meaning which was totally lost with the Latin translation of this term into
actualitas and its eventual transformation into Reality and Objectivity. (Mehta
1971,152).

Vis à vis the idea of God in form of the prime unmoved mover, moreover, the
question concerns the being, in the sense of both existence and essence, of the power that
enables the movement to completion of individual entities and what is as a whole. One
may debate what Aristotle himself meant and whether Heidegger’s interpretation of him
on the relation between terms like energeia and dynamis is right. 15 What is clear,
14
In God and Being, George Pattison talks about potentiality and actuality with reference to Heidegger
(Pattison 2011, 280–281), but he does not answer this question or even raise it. Yet it seems to me the central
question if we are debating the existence of God philosophically, where that means, to my mind, from a
standpoint that is not already a confessional one.
15
See Gonzalez 2006.
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

however, is that Heidegger refuses to posit, because there are no phenomenological

grounds to posit, an actually perfect form of being that is supposed to be responsible for
the limited process of perfecting that we observe among the entities we encounter in the
world, including ourselves. He also stresses the essential finitude of Dasein and,
correlatively, the finitude of what comes to light for it. In its appearing to us, ‘being’
will always be finite, because we are finite. Yes, we have a relation to the infinite or
perfect as an idea towards which we strive and before which we are lacking. But it does
not follow that there exists a being who embodies this perfection, an infinite being that
could be called God and is both the origin and end of what is. Even if we reject the
conception of God as a being, we cannot likewise reject the connection of God with
goodness and intentionality. Monism is not on its own a theological position, after all. If
it posits only a ‘nature’ governed by blind necessity or randomness, in no way tending
towards a good end, there is no reason to apply to it the term ‘God’. Thus, if what
Heidegger says of ‘being’ provides no grounds for believing in anything other than such
a nature, it provides no grounds for believing in the existence of God in any meaningful
sense.
And yet, at this juncture, I want to go back to the interpretation of Heideg-
ger as a kind of monist, particularly to the claim, repeated in many of his later
works, that we belong to the self-disclosure of being, participating in a process
of unconcealing which we do not initiate or govern. As we have seen, human-
ity, for Heidegger is the project of being, not the other way around. We stand
‘within’ physis—within nature, one might say, using one traditional term for
being—but in a different manner from entities that do not project possibilities
of their being and make decisions between them. Whatever faculties we pos-
sess, our perceptions, our capacity to project possibilities, our understanding of
our own existence and of the character of the things around us, arise from
‘being’, which we sometimes interpret as ‘nature’ but which contemporary
naturalism defines too narrowly. What then should we conclude about the
ultimate source of the possibilities we project? Or the power of the possible
itself? Or the perception of lack that drives us forward towards perfection and
the relation to the infinite that this entails? Or the sense of the holy as an
aspect of being, which we encounter sometimes in letting go of ourselves in a
certain manner?
Heidegger stops short of providing precise answers to these questions, perhaps
necessarily so as they exceed what phenomenology can reasonably be expected to
accomplish. There are, though, a couple of sentences near the end of the ‘Postscript’ to
‘What is Metaphysics?’ that may provide a clue. They run, in one translation:

The nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of being. Every destiny of beings has
already in its origins come to its completion in being.^ (P, 238)

(Das Nichts als das Andere zum Seienden is der Schleier des Seins. Im Sein hat
sich anfänglich jedes Geschick des Seienden schon vollendet.) (GA 9, 312)

The second sentence could also be translated: ‘In being the destiny of every
entity has been perfected from the beginning’. This seems, on the face of it, a
very odd thing for Heidegger to say. The principle of charity rules out an
 S. Sikka

interpretation of ‘being’ as a cosmic ground in which the perfection of all

entities is already contained in ideal form. That could be ‘God’, but such a
reading is discordant with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as ontotheology,
which centrally involves a critique of the interpretation of being as permanent
presence. Is there nonetheless some sense, one might ask, in which potentiality
also ‘is’? And in which this reaching for perfection on the part of an entity that
has a relation to perfection, and that itself belongs to the self-unfolding of
being, reveals something about being itself, even if we do not know and cannot
know exactly what that is?
The question here has to do, most fundamentally, with our relation to being, to what we
sometimes call ‘reality’. Heidegger’s analyses suggest that we moderns tend, on the one
hand, to overlook the fact that the mathematical and naturalistic interpretations of reality
involve projection, where that does not make them merely subjective, and at the same
time, we are too quick to label as subjective projection experiences and ideas that do not fit
these modern epistemological paradigms. Consider, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach’s
analysis of God as a human projection. For Feuerbach, ideas of God across the world’s
cultures are expressions of humanity’s highest values and wishes. God is ‘an unutterable
sigh, lying in the depths of the heart’, as he put it once (Feuerbach 1854, 121). These ideas
of God, Feuerbach claims, actually tell us about ourselves and only ourselves. God is
made in the image of man, not the other way around, and ideas of God are projections of
the essence of humanity, made complete and perfect (Feuerbach 1854, 14).
In relation to accounts like this, Heidegger’s analysis raises the question, but who are
we, this humanity that ‘projects’? How do we stand in relation to that governing source
which gives rise to us as to all other things? What might it indicate about that source
that it gives rise to a being who ‘projects’ perfection? This is the ontological question
for which Heidegger’s analysis clears space and which he tentatively explores. He does
not provide a definite answer, and perhaps no such answer can be given. However, he
does offer reasons to think that, since we are ourselves part of the unfolding of being,
enabled by the same power that presents itself in all that is (but also loves to hide), the
‘how’ of our being may indicate something about being itself. If that ‘how’ includes a
creative relation to the good that lies beyond what is actual, the attribution of this way
of being to the movement of the moving world may not simply constitute an anthro-
pomorphizing fiction. As Heidegger writes in his lectures on Schelling:

Does man not exist in such a way that the more primordially he is himself, he is
precisely not only and not primarily himself?

If man, as the being who is not only itself, becomes the criterion, then what does
humanizing (Vermenschlichung) mean? Does it not mean the precise opposite of
what the objection takes it for? (GA42, 284/STF, 163-64)

Applied to Heidegger’s own analysis in Being and Time, this thought suggests that the
‘existence’ of Dasein, which is not the constant sameness of a ‘substance’ but a reaching
for the good through which successive possibilities of its own being are realized, offers an
indication of the nature of being itself, in which Dasein participates and which is its source.
In that case, the ‘perfection’ of every being could be described as already there in the
beginning in a certain sense, as dynamis, which unfolds itself as energeia stretching
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

towards entelecheia. If identified with ‘God’, such being would have to include becoming,
as is the case, Heidegger notes, for Schelling’s understanding of God.16
To be sure, the ‘source’ being indicated through these philosophical reflections, the
source of our projections of the infinite towards which they gesture, is not the God of faith,
whom Heidegger tries to separate from philosophizing. But one might well wonder if the
so-called God of faith is really suited to the need of the times. Commenting on Heidegger,
Owen Prudhomme writes: ‘The name BGod^ has its origins in the precritical religious
relation itself, yet we live in an age that is essentially determined by critical reflection and
its ability to call all that is into question, including foremost any appearing deity’
(Prudhomme 1997, 38). Furthermore, as I pointed out earlier, the relation between faith
and philosophy that Heidegger’s account presupposes, along with the definition of faith as
the approach to ‘God’, is specific to only a subset of religions and arguably fully
appropriate only to a particular version of Protestant Christianity. It is not appropriate to
Indian traditions dealing with divinity and God, which did not take shape through a
distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’, or focus on belief as a requisite for
approaching God. It certainly should not be allowed to define what may be said about
God or how the question is to be approached.17
I would question also Heidegger’s often-quoted remark about the God of metaphys-
ics, the ontotheological God who, in some theological arguments, like those of Aquinas
borrowing from Aristotle, is described as a ‘self-caused cause’. That is just the right
term for such a God, Heidegger writes, for ‘man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this
God . . . Before the causa sui man can neither fall to this knees in awe nor can he play
music and dance before this God’ (GA11, 77/ID, 72). Granted that Heidegger may be
right to criticize the abstractness of some theological arguments and the God they end
up positing, I would nonetheless raise two objections. First, are people looking for
prayers and sacrifice in contexts where the so-called God of faith, with whom this God
of metaphysics is being contrasted, has become doubtful?18 In such contexts, moreover,

16
‘Schelling . . . wants to accomplish precisely this: to bring to a conceptual formulation how God comes to
himself, how God—not as a concept thought, but as the life of life—comes to himself. Thus a becoming God! . . .
If God is the being that is most in being, then the most difficult and greatest becoming must be in him and this
becoming must have the most extreme scope between his whence (Woher) and his whither (Wohin). But at the
same time, it is true that this whence of God, and also the whither, can again only be in God and as God himself:
being (Sein)! But the determination of beings in the sense of the presence of something objectively present
(Anwesenheit eines Vorhandenen) is no longer adequate at all to conceive this being (Seyn). Thus, Bexistence^ is
understood beforehand as Bemergence-from-self^ revealing oneself and in becoming revealed to oneself coming to
oneself, and because of this occurrence Bbeing^ with itself and thus in itself, Bbeing^ itself. God as existence, i.e.
the existing God, is this in himself historical God.’ (GA42, 190-91/STF, 109; translation modified).
17
Cf. Macquarrie: ‘I think one has to say very firmly that Heidegger must not be allowed to lay down what it
is permissible for theologians to say, or to decide unilaterally where the boundary between theology and
philosophy is to be drawn’ (Macquarrie 1984, 162).
18
My assessment of this point is limited to the meaning of ‘faith’ assumed by Heidegger, when he writes that
for faith the question of ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ has already been answered in the form
of a specific doctrine. I am not addressing alternative interpretations of the concept and certainly not possible
postmodern revisions. Rico Gutschmidt, for instance, sees Heidegger as making a move similar to Kant’s,
demonstrating the limits of reason (in this case, as producing ontotheological explanations) to make room for
faith (Gutschmidt 2012, 194, 200). However, he interprets faith not as belief in a supernatural entity, but a
certain lived comportment one might adopt in the face of the unknowability of being, the ultimate unknow-
ability of why there is anything at all, especially captured in Heidegger’s later idea of the ‘event’ (Ereignis)
(200–203). Gutschmidt’s analysis is intriguing, but one has to wonder what the content of this ‘faith’ is, if not
belief in a transcendent power to which the name ‘God’ (or Brahman or something like that) rightly applies.
 S. Sikka

noting that a particular idea of God is more lively and appealing does nothing to dispel
doubt. Second, if this God of metaphysics that Heidegger describes is supposed to be
the only alternative to the God of faith, it is a caricature. Even some of the seemingly
abstract ideas of God within Western philosophy are not so lifeless as that.19 This is true
of classical Indian philosophy as well, which, for better or worse, is actually not as
different from ancient and medieval Western philosophy as Heidegger seems to have
thought. For instance, surely Aristotle’s prime mover, the origin and governing princi-
ple of the motion of all that moves, is awe-inspiring, and could easily inspire music and
dance and be a fit recipient of the attitude of piety. The same is true of the brahman of
the Upanishads, who is said to pervade and ‘perfume’ ‘everything that moves in this
moving world’ (Isa Upanishad, first line; Upanishads 2003, 7). Such conceptions
indeed have little do with ‘faith’, but they connect with Heidegger’s reflections on
being. Do they all involve a questionable conception of the divine or absolute reality as
a purely actual and perfect constantly present substance? That seems implausible,
though it is hardly easy to determine what, precisely, is meant by Brahman in the
Upanishads and in the commentaries of its reverent followers, or by ‘God’ in the
writings of Eckhart. It is equally possible that these works are on the same track as
Heidegger or are at least tracking the same ‘something’.

Conclusion

I have been arguing that Heidegger’s analysis offers a promising, if not conclusive,
argument for believing that ‘God’, understood as an infinite power which both gives
rise to the world and moves it towards itself as a good end, ‘exists’, in the sense that
being governed by this power is truly the way of being. In addition, Heidegger’s
writings contain arguments for the validity of religious, or if you prefer ‘spiritual’,
beliefs that arise from experiences of the holy, and reasons not to dismiss these as
‘subjective’ in opposition to the allegedly ‘objective’ findings of science. Or one could
say that Heidegger actually validates ‘subjective’ sources of religiosity, if by ‘subjec-
tive’ we mean experiences of the world and at the same time of what seems to lie
strangely both within and beyond it, that do not get captured within what we currently
think of as ‘objective’ systems of knowledge. He does so by suggesting that the so-
called ‘subject’, with all of its powers and perceptions, arises from an encompassing
source whose nature it reveals, where only a partial and circumscribed aspect of that
source is appropriately captured in the concept of ‘nature’ that forms the basis for the
modern natural sciences.20
Admittedly, the experience of the holy, and what it might indicate about the
character of this source, cannot be comprehended and articulated with anything close

19
Stating the point differently, Macquarrie asks: ‘Have those who have used metaphysical language about
God really been talking about some other God from the God of faith, so that one cannot kneel in awe before
such a God?’ (Macquarrie 1984, 160)
20
Equally questionable are reductive accounts of religion within the social sciences that assume a ‘naturalistic’
explanation of experiences of the holy as the default position, rejecting the idea of religion as sui generis on
this (unexamined) basis. Examples are Wiebe 1984; Fitzgerald 2000; McKinnon 2003. Kenneth Rose rightly
criticizes such ‘methodological materialism’ about religion on the grounds that ‘materialism is an
underdetermined metaphysical view that cannot be made true by fiat’ (Rose 2013, 15).
Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

to the precision, clarity and certainty that characterizes the bodies of knowledge
within these sciences. What is said here can only take the form of symbols, but
these are symbols that open up levels of reality, as Paul Tillich claimed in his
account of religious language (Tillich 1987). They can genuinely do so,
Heidegger’s analysis implies, because we are ourselves symbols, signs of the
x (not a being) that presents itself in us, and presents the nature of things
through us. It is not clear whether this x should or will be called ‘God’, though
in the past it has sometimes been called God, or whether history will decide
otherwise. Heidegger himself writes, in ‘The Thinker as Poet’, that ‘we are too
late for the gods and too early for being’ (AED, 7/PLT, 4). One might also
caution, however, that in an age of uncertainty and experiment, it might be
especially important for philosophy to preserve its traditional sobriety of think-
ing against the temptations of poetry and prophecy.

Abbreviations for Heidegger’s texts

AED Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Heidegger 1954b)
BT Being and Time (Heidegger 1962)
BTr Being and Truth (Heidegger 2010)
BW Basic Writings (Heidegger 1993)
GA Gesamtausgabe (Heidegger 1975-)
Hw Holzwege (Heidegger 1980)
ID Identity and Difference (Heidegger 1969)
IM Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger 1987)
P Pathmarks (Heidegger 1998)
PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Heidegger 2004)
PLT Poetry, Language, Thought (Heidegger 1971)
QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Heidegger 1977)
STF Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Heidegger 1985)
TK Die Technik und die Kehre (Heidegger 1988)
VA Vorträge und Aufsätze. (Heidegger 1954a)
WT What is a Thing? Heidegger (1967)

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