Chapter 6 CAN 'CREATION' BE a METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT?

Chapter 6 CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT?

Peter Harris Memorial University of Newfoundland

INTRODUCTION

It may seem strange to raise the question of creation as a possible metaphysical concept in the context of the work of Martin Heidegger, who notoriously announced the end of metaphysics. However, the question as to whether Heidegger was successful in this enterprise remains open to debate in spite of his intention to “leave metaphysics to itself.”1 There can be little question that Heidegger’s work at least belongs to the history of metaphysics, if for no other reason than its ongoing engagement with the tradition of metaphysical thinking in western philosophy. This essay makes a choice between two available approaches to the question of the concept of creation and the nature of metaphysics. One approach would be to question in a rather general way whether the concept of creation has a place in metaphysical thinking in general, along with other concepts like being, time, causality, etc. The other possibility is to examine it 127

William Sweet (ed.), Approaches to Metaphysics: 127–136. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 128 PETER HARRIS in a particular instance, e.g. the place of the idea of creation in the metaphysics of a particular philosophical view such as that of Hegel or Bergson or Whitehead or Heidegger. For the most part it seems to the present writer that the latter contextualized approach is more fruitful, and it has determined the main theme of the paper. However, I have felt it useful to begin by asking in a rather general way about a distinction between creation in a strong sense and what for want of a better term I have called “ontological dependence.” In particular I will ask the question: What does the concept of creation add above and beyond the notion of ontological dependence? By ontological dependence I mean something like the positions reached by the philosophers of antiquity, by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and other neo- Platonists, according to which the world remains unintelligible in the final analysis without a relation of dependence on some principle or ground such as the Good, God, the One, the One “beyond being” and so on. In each of them an ultimate principle or ground is assigned. Although Plato does indeed, in the Timaeus, make use of a creation myth to account for the mediation between chaotic matter and ideal order, there is little to suggest that this was for Plato anything more than a useful myth serving to bridge the world of becoming with the world of pure intelligible being. It is quite clearly other than the Christian doctrine of creation in both its premises and its import and intent. The Platonic myth does not, in my view, add anything substantive to the notion of ontological dependence. Whether this ultimate reality is called the Good, God or the One, Greek thinking designates a term for the ontological dependence of the cosmos. This end point of speculative thought is, as Aquinas repeatedly points out in the five ways, what all people at least mean by God. Nothing more is established by these arguments than the notion of ontological dependence. The conclusions of the five ways offer points of connection for the incorporation of Greek speculative thought into the service of fides quaerens intellectum.2 They do not establish that the nature of this dependence is one of creation in the strong sense. Nevertheless, the primary source for Christian theology and, in the present context, for the strong notion of creation was never unaided human thinking but rather the event of divine self-disclosure or revelation. For Christian speculative theology or theological science the question has always arisen as to the measure of agreement and contradiction which might exist between rational, philosophical conclusions and the vision of things disclosed by divine revelation. Is the Christian believer justified in importing humanistic speculation into the understanding of faith? For the medievals, grace does not destroy but perfects nature. This essential optimism with regard to human nature and knowledge is what underlies the belief of the scholastics that a ground for agreement can be found between Greek CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? 129 philosophy and Christian belief. It is therefore not surprising that the philosophical notion of ontological dependence should be tied into the distinctively Christian doctrine of creation in medieval thinking, while nevertheless including quite new elements derived from revelation. The Protestant tradition from Luther to Barth has, on the other hand, tended to draw a more radical divide between philosophy as merely human conjecture and the saving faith which condemns speculation as mere vanity and untruth. The close integration of ontological dependence with the Christian belief in creation remains in that context much more dubious. While still at this rather general level it is already interesting to note the position adopted in these matters by Heidegger in a relatively early, but important, essay on “Phenomenology and Theology.”3 Heidegger embraces elements of both positions – drawing a hard “fideistic” (“Protestant”) line between philosophy and theology and accepting the “necessary atheism” of philosophy, yet at the same time recognizing that theology inevitably builds upon, even as it transforms, the essential structures of the analytic of Dasein. Unfortunately, at least as far as I know, Heidegger did not return to a formal discussion of the relation after the turn from this analytic to the question of Being as he approaches it in his later work. This rather formal statement of position, however, probably does not do full justice to the reality of Heidegger’s implication of theology into his speculative thought about Being – as, I hope, the present essay will go some way to show.

ONTOLOGICAL DEPENDENCE AND ‘CREATION’

At this point I want to raise in a preliminary and rather general way the question: What does the Christian doctrine of creation add over and above the bare notion of ontological dependence? I think there are three essential elements: creation ex nihilo (certainly questionable for Aristotle); creation in time (the world has a beginning – also rejected by Aristotle), and divine freedom in creation (perhaps excluded also in neo-Platonic theories of emanation). It is certainly not my aim here to go into the medieval treatments of creation to show how the biblical material concerning the divine making of the world was amalgamated with the notions of ontological dependence derived from the Greek tradition. I have elsewhere argued that in Aquinas, for example, the analogies of emanation and causal production are combined in the treatment of creation to realize just such a fusion.4 What is quite clear is that the direction of the argument is from the divine creator as the first article of faith to conclusions about the nature of the relation of the created world to Him, rather than the other way about. In other words, the argument does not 130 PETER HARRIS move from ontological dependence to creation in the strong sense, but rather the other way about. As Aquinas recognizes, without this privileged source, no certain conclusion could be reached, for example, about the creation of the world in time. Nevertheless, in giving an account of creation ex nihilo, Aquinas imports, with suitable qualifications, an Aristotelian causal- productive analysis of the divine creative act.5 Although Plato’s demiurgos is the closest prefiguring of this aspect of the doctrine of creation, extremely important differences are to be noted: the activity of the demiurgos does not include the creation of matter as such, which pre-exists as the elements in a chaotic state; the activity of the creator is subject to and limited by the eternal, pre-existent forms; and time is patterned upon eternity in its orderliness. It is a myth of creation based simply on a theory of ontological dependence. In the Christian version and its development in medieval theology, in spite of the dependence on the speculative instruments of Greek philosophical concepts, the dependence on pre-existing matter and the patterning on eternal pre-existing forms is progressively eliminated and the creation of the world in time is directly linked to a linear historical sense of time, rather than to the eternal regularity of cyclical time. It might therefore be argued, in the light of these considerations, that what we now have is a good example of what Heidegger rather scathingly referred to as “onto-theology” – in other words, Greek philosophical insights, debased through their subordination to the “positive” science of theology. Nevertheless, it could be well argued that a great deal in modern speculative metaphysics results precisely from the new view of the world heralded by these developments in medieval theology. It was precisely through the recognition of the unlimited freedom of God in creation that events and beings in the world could be seen as essentially individual and as autonomous, as radically temporal and as in some sense self-structuring. The question of the metaphysical validity of the concept of creation cannot therefore be answered, I think, by reference backward to Greek metaphysics, but rather by reference to developments in modern speculative thinking.6 It was no doubt a long road historically that eventually led to the demise of “eternal ideas” and in general to the causal-productive way of thinking about the essential nature of things and events in the world, but the developments just briefly alluded to made possible a new kind of metaphysical analysis.

HEIDEGGER, THEOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS

It may seem that validation of creation as a metaphysical concept by way of Heidegger is doubly doomed. In the first place, Heidegger formally denied CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? 131 any possible dependence of philosophy upon theology on the grounds that theology is by nature a positive science and therefore deals with the ontic rather than the ontological.7 In the second place, Heidegger saw the doctrine of creation as exacerbating the obscurement of Being introduced by Plato’s subordination of the being of beings to the notion of form.8 Overtly, at least, Heidegger’s view of the Christian doctrine of creation is a hostile one and its implication in onto-theology suggests that he would not make use of it. It may further be argued that even if it could be shown that the notion of creation does re-emerge in Heidegger’s thought about das Ereignis, it would not be as a metaphysical concept, but rather as a thematic idea in that kind of “thinking” which he sees as displacing metaphysics in the accepted sense. All this, however, forms part of the unresolved question of the true nature of Heidegger’s relationship to what, for want of a better word, we may refer to as the “tradition.” Some very useful recent work by Herman Philipse has built on the work of Kisiel, Sheehan and Van Buren in reconstructing the threads which link Heidegger’s later thinking with his earlier interests in both theology and metaphysics.9 Philipse speaks of a “post-monotheist analogue of the creation myth” (p. 192). He draws attention specifically to the Letter on Humanism, to The Anaximander Fragment as well as to passages in the Beiträge. I should want to add some reference to two other important sources: The Origin of the Work of Art (OWA) and to Time and Being (TB) and it is to these that I turn my attention. In OWA Heidegger explores the nature of “coming to be” in works of art yet makes it quite clear that works of art are only one instance of strikingly creative events, and it is not unreasonable to see the focal instance as, in this case, exemplary for creative events generally. The burden of the OWA argument is to wean the reader away from a causal-productive account of the origin of such works in order to focus on the work itself as an event of the disclosure of truth in the work. Heidegger does not deny that works have both creators and preservers but that what has primary significance is what we can only call the self-origination of the work – the reality of the work is what it is in itself and cannot be reduced to the conditions of its coming to be. In the measure that it is thus irreducible and in the measure that we come to see it this way, it is an event of creation ex nihilo. Heidegger does not say this, but it is what lies unsaid in the strenuous effort to overcome the model of causal production. Heidegger accomplishes this by way of replacement of a matter– form account of the essential nature of the work of art, substituting his pair of earth and world; and he draws attention away from the act of creating through the suggestion that the artist’s business is not to impose form on matter but rather to allow the work to come into its own being.10 Viewed (in a way certainly not intended by Heidegger) as a theological position, it is a 132 PETER HARRIS doctrine of immanent creative presence in creative events in which what is essentially new and unpredictable comes into being. In other words, to use Philipse’s very useful expression of “post- monotheist analogue,” we might identify the three elements I earlier suggested as what differentiates creation proper from ontological dependence: creation in time, ex nihilo and with that essential freedom which allows the essentially new to emerge. Heidegger’s view of creation in OWA has very much greater kinship with the Christian doctrine of creation in these important respects, than with a Platonic or Aristotelian notion of becoming, or with the limited notion of ontological dependence. In OWA we are dealing essentially with an exemplary analogy. In TB, however, we are dealing in terms which have all the appearance of transcendental concepts, in spite of the fact that Heidegger is at great pains to say that they are not concepts in any accepted sense at all. But I will leave the question of conceptuality to the final part of the paper in which I try to answer the question posed in my title in the case of Heidegger. In TB, the persistent questioning as to the nature of Being returns in all its generality. Heidegger is explicit that this generality is to be restricted in no way by reference back to particular beings at all. Although all actual appearances or disclosures of Being are situated historically and are therefore specific to moments or epochs of history as well as of place (“the west,” etc), the analytic of both Time and Being in this essay seems to be transcendental in a sense akin to, but importantly different from, Kant’s usage. The kinship lies in the apparently a priori universality; the difference in the total absence of a transcendental subject. Of course, this element of relation to, and yet departure from, the tradition of German idealism is not the least of the sources of difficulty and obscurity in Heidegger. It is intimately bound up with the single-minded determination to break free from metaphysical thinking while yet remaining in a necessary dialogue with the metaphysical tradition. (Apart from the well-known remark in TB about “leaving metaphysics to itself,” the complexity of Heidegger’s position becomes clear in some lesser known passages in Identity and Difference, to which I shall return in the final section). If the notion of creation reappears in OWA, it is primarily in that quality of the work which Heidegger refers to as “createdness”; and this createdness appears in the work precisely as its “composition” and its autonomy or self- subsistence, in addition to its essential character of newness. In the more transcendental concerns of TB, in which Time and Being are the Sache des Denkens, createdness is characterized as “being given” and “being sent.” I have come to think that it is not without significance that these terms echo precisely the medieval notion of the immanence of God, not simply in created CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? 133 things in general but specifically in the immanence of the divine Trinity in human beings through grace. In medieval theology the immanence of the divine Trinity is to be discerned in all created beings, but the language of donum and missio (“gift” and “sending”) is reserved for the gracious presence of the divine Trinity in human beings. Now, it can certainly be argued that the recurrence of just these terms in TB, in a rather different context, is simply one of coincidence. But Heidegger’s elaborate concern to give substance to the es gibt of “there is being, there is time,” which forms the central theme of this essay, the most direct treatment of the essential nature of das Ereignis suggests that the terms are not without direct analogy to their counterparts in the medieval doctrines of creation and grace. What is at issue is not simply the Being of beings (creation in general) but the disclosure of the truth of Being in and to human beings. (In theological terms, we are dealing with revelation precisely as grace.) We could say then that TB offers a post- monotheist analogue of creation and grace which insists on the essential withholding of the source of the gift, of the sender from the sending. Createdness turns up in the ontological structure of the human world as sending and giving. The essential structure of the Ereignis, heralded by the es gibt is to be found in the three notions of sending, giving and withholding.11

HEIDEGGER AND METAPHYSICS

Our chief concern here, however, is not with the theological analogies directly – although I have tried to indicate that in Heidegger’s appropriation of the tradition they are inseparable – but rather with the status of the notion of creation in Heidegger in reference to metaphysics. My general argument is that the necessary relations of creation with the ex nihilo, with time and with creative freedom, all find their counterparts in Heidegger’s notion of the creative Event. I have also argued that at least implicitly in OWA and more explicitly in TB, we are dealing with transcendental matters and this inevitably suggests that we are here doing metaphysics. Yet, in TB very explicitly, Heidegger rejects the notion that what he is engaged in is metaphysics (TB 24). The whole nerve of his thinking, when it seeks to reach beyond the tradition, is the overcoming of metaphysics. On many occasions I have turned to the commentators to get a clearer understanding of precisely what it is about metaphysical thinking which Heidegger identifies with the Seinsvergessenheit, the forgetfulness of Being, which reaches its extreme in contemporary technological attitudes. I have not generally found them helpful, but would suggest that the following are at least essential aspects of the case against metaphysics as it emerges from 134 PETER HARRIS

Heidegger’s thinking. There are at least two principles which Heidegger sees as endemic to metaphysical thinking and which can be traced in the history of philosophy from Plato to Hegel. They are the principle of identity and the principle of sufficient reason.12 Both are treated by Heidegger in what I would call a post-idealist context. Both have similar implications: the unity of thought and being. What the history of western metaphysics reveals is the emergent dominance of thought over being, from the Platonic to the Hegelian Absolute Idea. The principle of identity suggests that even though A=A or I=I is a synthetic principle and not a mere tautology, the synthesis is one of perfect resolution, with, so to speak, no remainder. The principle of sufficient reason spells this out – in Heidegger’s expression of it: Nothing is without reason. Reason is the source of all truth. For Hegel, the perfection of Revelation which Christian thought represents imagistically, becomes the self-conscious certainty of Reason in philosophical science in which the Concept, das Begriff, is the instrument of expression of a completed truth about Being. This of course does not imply that the subjective philosopher possesses the whole truth of being but rather that in philosophy there is a self- conscious awareness of the necessary relation of thought and being. Put very simplistically, Heidegger’s view is that the identity suggested by the historic dictum of Parmenides that “being and thought are the same” may be understood as a misreading of the identity which Parmenides has in mind. As Heidegger sees it, has been understood as identity without difference. He suggests that the identity be reconstrued as a “belonging together” which does not exclude difference. Thought and Being indeed belong together, but Being cannot be encompassed by or resolved into thought. The “sending” which grants “truth” always withholds itself. The Nothing from which Being appears is not the mere negative of negation in thought but is, to put it very crudely, an ontological Nothing. I grant immediately that Heidegger on the “Nothing which nothings” is perhaps the aspect of his writing most obscure and difficult to interpret and I feel far from confident that I am doing it justice. But the upshot, I think, has to be that the force of the ex nihilo in the doctrine of creation has, in Heidegger’s view, really been devalued in subsequent attempts to produce a metaphysics of creation.

CONCLUSION

The original question whether creation is a metaphysical concept is answered in the negative by Heidegger. But this is not on account of the lack of transcendental import in the idea of creation, but rather because metaphysics as a legitimate mode of thought is no longer possible. Its demise results from CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? 135 what Gadamer rather understates in his nice phrase: “over-confidence in the Concept.”13 The Will to Power reveals this over-confidence for what it is: the total reduction of being to availability to calculative thinking in the technological era, the assignment of all being to the status of “standing reserve,” the reduction of human being to “human resources,” etc. No return to metaphysics is possible, nor could it be helpful. The idea of creation in Heidegger’s thought belongs to a new kind of philosophical enterprise which he refers to as “the task of thinking.” The question arises: What name do we give to ideas (used in a very loose sense) which in an identifiable corpus of work like that of Heidegger have at least some of the characteristics of what we would traditionally have called concepts? I suppose we would have to call them something like “key words.” The thinking which situates itself in the wake of the metaphysical tradition has in no way renounced the asking of questions about Being from which that tradition took its origin. Nor is it to be confused with poetry from which it remains distinct. Yet it has in common with poetry the engagement of thought with being in the medium of language. The essential difference (between poetry and thinking) is difficult to identify, other than that thinking concerns itself endlessly with questioning, whereas in poetry, language simply speaks. Language is, for Heidegger, the essential locus of the belonging together of thought and being for post-metaphysical thinking, and in this locus not only “creation” but the “nothing” from which creation emerges, the “temporality” of creative events and the possibility of the “new” which is allowed when freedom replaces necessity all belong to the idea or key word of creation in Heidegger’s post-metaphysical philosophy.

CLOSING COMMENT

I would like to note that I am not in agreement with Heidegger’s or others’ pronouncements about the closure of metaphysics. It seems to me that the announcement of the demise of metaphysics is at least somewhat premature and can be understood as following from a particular way of telling the story of metaphysics which does not impose itself. Heidegger’s and kindred positions seem to result from a forcing of that history through what I would term the idealist bottleneck. In a certain sense it is only when that history has as an obligatory final chapter, something like an Hegelian system, that the criticism of the whole tradition as Heidegger sees it becomes mandatory. But there are other ways of reading the links and connections between the succession of metaphysical philosophies than that of an ineluctable necessity. There are no doubt lessons and cautions of an important nature still to be 136 PETER HARRIS taken in and pondered by the contemporary metaphysician, but the proclamation of the winding-up of speculative metaphysics seems to me to be an over-dramatization of the essential finitude of philosophical systems and projects.

NOTES

1 On Time and Being [Zur Sache des Denkens], tr. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1972, p. 24. 2 See my essay “The Argument from Contingency Then and Now,” God and Argument, ed. William Sweet, Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 1999. 3 See the essay “Phenomenology and Theology,” Pathmarks, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. German text is in Wegmarken, Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1967; 1978. 4 See note 2. 5 Summa theologiae I, qq. 44, 45. For Aristotle himself the relation between the world and God is limited to one of final causality and does not include any notion of efficient causality. 6 Important aspects of these developments are surveyed in a forthcoming essay by James Bradley: “Transformations in Speculative Philosophy, 1870–1945.” 7 See note 1. 8 See e.g. Identity and Difference [Identitat und Differenz], tr. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1969, and “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Pathmarks. 9 H. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 10 I have explored this in greater detail in yet unpublished papers: “Creativity in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Creation ex nihilo – Creative Events.” 11 Theological note: Just as there is sometimes difficulty in theology in establishing the need for two divine processions of Word and Spirit, or at least some difficulty in adequately distinguishing them, it is not altogether clear why Heidegger needs both terms in his account of the essential structure of Ereignis. 12 See Identity and Difference, op. cit., and The Principle of Reason, [Satz vom Grund], tr. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 13 H-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr. and ed. David E. Linge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 125ff.