The Question of Faith and Reason

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We are confronted with an opposition between faith and reason, we moderns and post-moderns, whether we recognize it or not; whether we approve and promote it or deny and reject it; and whether we find ourselves responsible for its existence or perpetuation, or merely find ourselves thrown into it as an inheritance from those originally responsible. To describe the opposition is not difficult, particularly at its extremes: on one extreme, fanatical believers adhering to authoritative religious doctrines and ignoring or rejecting scientific evidence, procedures, and conclusions that threaten their doctrines or the authority behind them; on the other side, fanatical atheists rejecting the truth and reality of everything that cannot be materially measured or logically validated according to the standards and methods of modern science. These extremes govern the confrontation, but those not on the extremes cannot help but be caught in the middle; they can try to ignore the conflict or reconcile the opposing sides, but they cannot exist outside the conflict because this conflict dominates the world we live in.

This paper will pursue the possibility of reconciliation, but with a significant proviso: namely, that both faith and reason (or thinking) be reconceived in terms largely foreign to the partisans who drive the opposition, and re-appropriated from the contexts in which the opposition first emerged to dominate the modern world. 1 It is not my intention to rehearse the history of this emergence or to trace the different forms the opposition has taken in modernity or pre-modernity; to consider, for example, the debates between Darwinians and Creationists, the conflict between early modern scientists and the Catholic Church, the problematic reception of Aristotelian thought by the medieval Scholastics, nor, in the ancient world, the tensions between conventional piety and philosophy responsible, in part, for the death of Socrates. Rather, I will subject the terms of the debate to philosophical scrutiny, inspired in complementary ways by the thought of Heidegger among modern thinkers and Plato and Aristotle among the ancients, to suggest that we must look both backwards and forwards to break free of the contemporary morass and progress to a new understanding of the nature and possibility of thoughtful faith or faithful thinking.

First of all, let us consider more closely why faith and reason have come into conflict, not in terms of historical events, but in terms of the concepts themselves. In St. Paul's famous and influential definition, “faith

(pistis ) is the substance ( hupostasis ) of things hoped for, the evidence ( elenchos ) of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1,

1 I am not claiming that the two sides can only be reconciled in the way I go on to describe, but my approach has the virtue of not assuming or even addressing the truth of the Christian revelation or that claimed by any other religion, and so remains firmly philosophical rather than theological. 2

KJV ). 2 The second part more directly concerns the nature of faith itself, as opposed to its relation to hope; it states that faith is an “evidence,” an elenchos ,3 which in this context refers to the internal state of conviction (as the term has also been translated) attendant on an external demonstration (which elenchos can also mean) concerning some unseen reality or state of affairs ( pragmat ōn). The external demonstration cannot be scientific in nature because the state of affairs in question is not sensory or material in nature; indeed, in a religious context, the state of affairs in question is not “in nature” at all, but super-natural; not just immaterial but spiritual. What kind of demonstration can there be of immaterial, supernatural realities? The de-monstration of re-velation. Literally a demonstration is a thorough showing of something, hence a kind of revealing or revelation. In Paul's own case, of course, the demonstration was, on his own account, direct and immediate: he claims to have seen (and heard), 4 the otherwise unseen spiritual realities that produced in him the conviction or belief in the truth of Christianity (and also, in poetically appropriate fashion, temporary physical blindness). However, such cases are, to say the least, extraordinarily rare; faith for most people most of the time is based on an indirect revelation, which is to say, on belief in the testimony of others, and ultimately on the testimony of those, like Paul or the evangelists, who claim to have experienced a direct revelation. The believer accepts their testimony as authoritative, in part because their authority is backed up by the authority of religious institutions, the surrounding community, family, friends, and in short, by the convictions of those whom one trusts.5

What makes faith in this sense problematic from the standpoint of reason, and especially scientific reason, is precisely the inadequacy of its reasons, which is to say the inadequacy of revelation, at least of the indirect sort, as a reason or ground for accepting the truth claims of religion. Scientific reason proceeds methodically and

2 Here and in the ensuing analysis I am working with an explicitly Christian concept and context; nevertheless, much of what follows can be applied to faith in general, whatever the specific religious context. 3 This term is unusual in the NT, but not at all in philosophy; one thinks at once of the Socratic elenchos , his logical refutation of opponents through the elicitation of their (eventually) self-contradictory opinions. While this cannot be the sense here (it does mean refutation or reproof in its only other NT appearance at 2 Timothy 3.16; cf. John 3.20, where the verb form has been translated reproved and also exposed), the use of a term with strong philosophical associations (as is also the case with hupostasis ) is not accidental or surprising in a writer like Paul, who certainly had some knowledge of philosophy and interacted with philosophers (cf. Acts 17.18-34). It may well be the case, then, that Paul deliberately invokes and then displaces in paradoxical fashion the philosophical-scientific connotation of conviction through logical argumentation as well as the mathematical connotation of proof through deductive reasoning and the legal connotation of conviction based on evidence. The paradox is that conviction-through-demonstration could occur, and legitimately so, without the kind of reasoning or evidence that would meet the usual philosophical, scientific, mathematical, or legal standards. 4 Whether bodily or not, he claimed not to know (2 Corinthians 12.2-4); but if the definition of faith is meant to apply to Paul himself, either he could not have seen what he saw with his bodily eyes, but with a spiritual or mental vision not included in the definition's sense of seeing, or he had still to make a leap to other truths from what he saw, truths that could not themselves be “seen,” and so could only be a matter of faith. 5 Trust, of course, is itself an expression of faith, and pistis may be translated as trust or faith. 3 cautiously, accepting premises on the basis of empirical evidence and calculating consequences from them according to the rules of logic. In its methods and procedures, science simply exercises the usual function of reason within a more theoretical domain and in a more rigorous way. Reason by its very nature and name (Latin: ratio ;

Greek: logistik ē) is calculative, deductive, discursive; it is the power to connect reasons to phenomena as their causal or explanatory ground (German: Grund ). Faith takes what is to reason an unwarranted leap, a groundless leap, from lack of evidence to conclusion, from unverified testimony to belief, or even from direct vision of some phenomenon to the supernatural or divine condition of that phenomenon or to certain doctrines not directly verified by the vision. 6 So to reason, faith, as the conviction produced by the revelation of unseen states of affairs, is inherently irrational, because the revelation, particularly when based merely on testimony, is not a sufficient reason to believe something that, as unseen or unseeable, cannot be verified.

Of course, to faith the demands of scientific reason themselves appear unreasonable, because they stem from a materialistic and methodological bias that automatically rules out anything but its own preferred version of reality. Believers will point not only to the trustworthiness of the sources of revelatory testimonies and the miraculous events behind them that ground the central doctrines of the faith 7 but also to an experiential dimension of evidence that, as inaccessible as it is to scientific verification, nonetheless confirms for believers the reality and efficacy of God's presence in their lives and the life of their communities. So it is not only common but even quite understandable—and dare we say it, reasonable —for believers to find the standpoint of scientific reason unreasonable and grounded on a kind of dogmatic faith, given their own standards of evidence and reality.

To take this opposition seriously enough to hope to overcome it, let us first acknowledge the strongest argument of each side, or stated the other way, the greatest weakness of each position. The greatest weakness of faith is its reliance on indirect testimony, and this is a weakness acknowledged by faith both in the special authority granted to those who are supposed to have witnessed the sacred events of Scripture themselves and in the importance accorded to the living experience of the faith in one's life as a believer, without which belief remains

6 To take the example of Paul's vision (and his hearing of God's voice in Acts 9; cf. Acts 22, 26), what he saw (and heard) might have been caused by a physiological state in his own body or brain and not by the direct apprehension of heavenly realities; and even if he did see heavenly realities or hear voices assuring him of the truth of Christianity, what he saw and heard did not directly bear on the core dogmas of Christianity, because he did not see that Jesus was born of a virgin and raised from the dead any more than he saw that Jesus was the Messiah or the Son of God or the second person ( hupostasis again) of God Himself, assuming such a thing were even possible. Even to hear a voice from a blinding light refer to its source as Jesus does not constitute scientific proof that Jesus is God. 7 Including the “miracle” of the explosive growth of Christianity. 4 merely a matter of childish assumption or superficially verbal assent. To this we may add the emphasis on experiential confirmation promised to the believer in the afterlife as well as the promise of direct revelation at the end of time. 8 Faith traditionally requires the acceptance both of the past events testified to by the direct witnesses and of the future events promised by those same witnesses, 9 but both past and future events are themselves grounded on direct experience that can only take place in the present. More to the point, faith in those events must somehow be experienced as real in the present life of the believer—and above all the central event of God's self-manifestation in the world.

On the other side, the weakness of reason in its doctrinaire scientific mode is its refusal to acknowledge any experience that cannot be materially measured or logically validated, at least as the basis for accepting as factual some truth claim about reality. The problem here, as Plato already saw, 10 is that almost no one really is that doctrinaire, because when put to the test few people would have the temerity (or dialectical skill) to maintain that they accept the reality of nothing but material and sensible data, for this would require denying the reality of core principles—such as happiness, justice, loyalty, and friendship—according to which most people evaluate the lives of themselves, others, and society in general. Even the notion of “life” itself, as basic as it is to the science of biology, among others, remains fundamentally mysterious and inaccessible in its nature to scientific comprehension, although its manifestations may be measured in various ways. The same is true of consciousness and of mental and emotional phenomena in general, or in sum, of everything, along with life itself, that we might call (as the Greeks did), the soul or aspects of the soul ( psych ē). To this we might add that scientific reason can say nothing about the most important aspect of anyone's life or of the world itself, namely the very fact of existence, however much it might be able to speak to cosmic events such as the “big bang,” 11 because existence as such, or being itself, is not itself an entity or physical phenomenon subject to empirical or logical verification.

Only now, having taken into account the weaknesses of both faith and reason in their doctrinaire forms, are we in a position to explore the possibility of reconciling their positions. The key lies in the indispensability of direct

8 The importance of this revelation within the Christian religion is evident from the Book of Revelations itself, given the concluding position within the New Testament. 9 Here we can note the particularly futural emphasis in the Hebrews passage where Paul presents his definition of faith. He remarks in particular on the faith of the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs that allowed them to do the will of God without understanding it and without receiving the promise, for the ultimate purpose and meaning of their actions was revealed only with the coming of Christ. 10 See his account of the “earth-born” materialists in the Sophist (246a ff.) 11 Which itself is by no means a “fact” but a theory, or in other words a hypothesis that more or less adequately explains the significance of certain materially measurable data. 5 but scientifically unverifiable experience for both faithful believers and rational scientists, particularly in relation to what is most fundamental to human existence. The question is, how can we begin to think about such experience or the nature of the reality that it concerns? To begin with an ancient insight, spoken by Parmenides and developed in different ways by Plato and Aristotle, among others: “The same is for thinking and being.” 12 To interpret, the measure of thinking is the reality that thinking thinks; so thinking in the deepest and most fundamental sense concerns reality in the deepest and most fundamental sense. 13 This reality may equally well be called being itself, in the sense of “being qua being” (Aristotle), as distinct from any particular being or even all particular beings taken in aggregate, or “beyond being” (Plato), in the sense of not being or having being as particular beings do either singly or collectively. Let us refer to this highest or deepest reality (as inadequate and provisional as these formulations and descriptions may be) simply as Being. What kind of thinking, then, is suitable for or measured by Being? The question itself suggests the answer: that is, questioning is the most suitable way of thinking about the greatest and most difficult problems, those realities or beings we least of all know, and especially the most elusive and unique reality, distinct from all other realities or beings because it is not a being but Being itself, and at the same time most intimately involved with all particular beings both individually and collectively, just insofar as they are , and with ourselves most of all, just insofar as we most of all are capable of recognizing and addressing Being through questioning.

Among moderns, Heidegger saw most clearly that Being must be addressed with thoughtful questioning, and above all with the Question that most fittingly expresses the riddle of Being, namely, “What is Being?” With this question comes the related question that prepares the way for this question and emphasizes in particular the relation of Being and beings, namely, “Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?” 14 Given our particular topic, it is not my intention here to trace out Heidegger's elaboration and dissection of this question, as fascinating and fruitful as his ruminations may be, any more than I mean to explore the particular parameters of Parmenides'

12 To gar auto noein estin te kai einai : (fragment 3) 13 As Plato's fundamental distinction between being ( ousia ) and becoming ( genesis ) is the measure of his equally fundamental distinction between knowledge ( epist ēmē) and opinion ( doxa ) ( Republic 5 et al.). And as Aristotle distinguishes the parts of the rational soul ( logon echon ) as scientific ( to epist ēmonikon ) or calculative ( to logistikon ) according to the measure of the reality, eternal or changing, that it apprehends ( Nicomachean Ethics 6.1 et al.). Of course, these passages are simply examples, which by no means exhaust the thinking of either thinker on the relation of thinking and being. 14 Warum ist überhaupt Seindes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? On first question, cf. GA XXXI, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie , ed. H. Tietjen (1982), 73, 203; Nietzsche , vol. 1, tr. D.F. Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 4; and Sein und Zeit , throughout. On second question, cf. GA LXV, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) , ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (1989), 509; and especially Einführung in die Metaphysik ., throughout. 6 utterance concerning thinking and being or the foundational and ground-breaking writings of Plato or Aristotle (or anyone else). But let us take note of a passing remark Heidegger makes concerning faith early on in his development of the second question in the Introduction to Metaphysics . He points out that the believer already has an answer to this question: there are beings because God created them, and God himself has no creator because he is eternally existent. The believer therefore cannot seriously ask the question (but only in a hypothetical “as if” fashion) precisely because his faith has already supplied the answer in advance—unless, that is, he wishes seriously to question his faith, in which case he has already relinquished it, even if only temporarily. Faith, then, in

Heidegger's view, short-circuits the possibility of thinking about Being and replaces it, at best, with the possibility of thinking about the being called God. Philosophy, in other words, is replaced with theology. If theology is based on faith and philosophy on reason, we have thus run aground once more on the apparently irreconcilable opposition between the two. Faith precludes the thinking that is questioning and therefore rejects reason, while philosophy questions the answers provided by faith and therefore rejects faith. Just as Paul observes the foolishness of faith for philosophy (1 Corinthians 1.23), Heidegger observes, “What is really asked in our question is, for faith, foolishness.

Philosophy consists in such foolishness.”15

Now, however, the meaning of reason has changed; for if “reason” or “reasoning” in the most proper sense means philosophical thinking, and philosophical thinking in the most proper sense means the questioning-thinking about Being, reason could hardly take the dogmatic form of materialistic atheism or logical positivism. Indeed, whatever else we might be able to say about Being, as distinct from all beings and not itself a “thing” at all, it could hardly be some-thing bodily that could be verified and measured with sensory instruments. But then, on what basis can we postulate such a thing that is not a thing, that does not itself “exist” as beings exist, that we have as yet no clear way of knowing at all, and that we therefore cannot say anything determinate about? To postulate such a non- thing, even if only to motivate the questioning of it: is this not itself a kind of faith? If so, it cannot be the traditional kind of faith to which Heidegger opposes philosophy, for this faith precludes questioning in its supplying of doctrinally authoritative answers. Heidegger gives us an alternative to rational thinking in its dogmatic guises with the radical questioning of Being while apparently positing a traditional faith opposed no less to (and by) the one than the other. 16 Yet both the faith that posits “God created heaven and earth,” or “Jesus is God and the Son of God,” as

15 Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. Polt and Fried, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 8. 16 This seems even more obviously the case in “Phenomenology and Theology,” which makes the subject of (Christian) faith and theology explicitly the historical events recounted in the Bible (in Pathmarks , trans. James 7 well as the questioning that posits in its very questioning the Being that is neither a being nor all beings together, are responding to an unseen reality that somehow reveals itself beyond both the perception of the physical senses and the scientific and logical ways of knowing of the rational intellect. In turn, this revelation effects a certain motivating conviction, sufficient at least to perpetuate faithful observance on the one hand and philosophical questioning on the other. Can we say, then, that both traditional religious belief and the philosophical questioning of

Being, however different they may be, meet the classic definition of faith discussed a moment ago—a conviction based on the revelation of unseen realities that, in its motivating power, could also be called the substance or foundation of hope?

The question is worth pursuing, but let us first note two crucial revisions to the traditional notion of faith that would be necessary to bring faith within the orbit of philosophical questioning as we have described it. One is explicitly stated and the other is implicit in that same passage from Heidegger. He distinguishes genuine faith from a kind of “indifference” maintained out of “convenience”—through which one thoughtlessly decides to maintain certain handed-down dogmas into the indefinite future—on the basis of the openness of genuine faith to the possibility of “unfaith” (Unglauben ). 17 The explicit point, in other words, is that genuine faith allows itself to be confronted by doubt. The implicit point, then, is that genuine faith cannot simply accept the inherited doctrines as inherited. We return here to the distinction between direct and indirect revelation noted above. A genuine faith is not content with indirect revelation, with faith in testimony, and so doubts it, wrestles with it and with its content, longing for the resolution of uncertainty in direct experience of the divine. Yet the believer maintains his faith, if it is genuine, not through an agreement with himself to continue believing because it is easier or because the alternative is frightening or scandalous, but because he is engaged in direct confrontation with the object of faith, an

Auseinandersetzung which yields certain experiences both positive and negative, but in both cases sufficiently validating of faith to allow its continuation as a doubting faith, which is to say a conscious and self-consciously questioning faith. Genuine faith, in other words, experiences direct revelation, but does so only as a doubting-faith or a faithful-doubting, and as such can never experience a revelation sufficient to end all doubt and questioning, because such a revelation would spell the end of faith itself.

Hart and John Maraldo, ed. William McNeill [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 39-62). On the other hand, Heidegger emphasizes that the very historicity of the faith must become the basis of the present existence of the believer (cf. pp. 47-48). In terms of the interpretation advanced here, this would mean that faith must find resonance in the present practical experience and life of the believer and not just in his theoretical acceptance of second-hand testimony or the pronouncements of authorities. 17 Introduction to Metaphysics , p. 8. 8

The divide between questioning faith and questioning philosophy, then, rests solely and squarely on the distinction between God and Being, and so on whatever doctrinal conceptions of God and related matters are faithfully maintained even as they are doubtfully questioned. Should one simply give the name of “God” to Being without accepting any doctrinal pronouncements concerning God, according to a strictly negative theology, 18 the standpoints of faith and philosophy would become indistinguishable. Whatever the communal, ritualistic, or practical aspects of some particular religion that one might choose to practice for various non-dogmatic reasons (e.g. moral discipline, emotional fulfillment, respect for tradition, avoiding scandal), so long as one makes no dogmatic commitments concerning the nature of God in doing so, it would seem that philosophy-as-questioning-Being could have no objections. However unusual such a faith might seem to be from a traditional standpoint, it has the distinctive virtue of overcoming the strongest criticism leveled against faith by scientific reason, namely, of leaping groundlessly to dogmatic pronouncements from unverifiable premises. For even as it maintains its faithful commitment to seeking God, it does so in a perpetually questioning, thoughtful way, responding to, engaging with, and pursuing a personal experience of the divine, however fleeting and fragmentary, without drawing any dogmatic conclusions about the nature of God. Scientific reason may well fail to accept the validity of such experience, but this refusal reflects rather the dogmatism of reason than any flaw in the nature of faith.

Having established a conception of faith sufficient to meet both the Pauline definition of faith and the primary criticism of scientific reason, then, let us deepen our exploration of its nature by considering just what is sought in the faithful questioning of God-as-Being. Presumably a questioner seeks answers of some sort. Certainly the faithful questioner seeks to know God-as-Being, both as such and in relation to beings as their generative ground; so the questioner asks, “What is Being?” and “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” Yet one is satisfied neither with the answer “God is Being” and “God created beings” nor with the ground of such answers in sacred texts or institutions, but desires somehow to know God directly as the ground, to have this ground revealed to one, to experience this ground by actively engaging with it. One seeks the source and end ( arch ē and telos ) of one's being in Being. But what is the being that seeks fulfillment in Being? A questioning being: a being that questions

Being. In questioning, this being seeks fulfillment in an answer, indeed cannot coherently question without hope in the possibility of an answer and without some glimmering awareness of the reality that it questions. Yet this being could not be fulfilled as a questioning being if it obtained a final answer to its question; a complete answer would

18 For example, the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius. 9 spell the end of the questioner as a questioner, and so as the being of the questioner in its most essential nature. 19

Is it possible, then, that the questioner might find fulfillment in continually coexisting in a questioning way with the questioned? If so, this questioning coexistence cannot result in answers that preclude all further questions.

Or at least and above all, the Question, the question concerning Being, cannot find an answer that would preclude or conclude the asking of the Question, for it is the Question that in the first place brings us as questioners into relationship with Being as questioned, and as questioned, distinguished from the beings that (mysteriously) have being or are in being, or simply are . The key lies in the proper understanding of the Question. If the Question is to acknowledge, manifest, and preserve the distinction between beings and Being, it cannot interrogate Being as a being. But this is precisely what happens when one seeks to answer the “what” of Being by assigning it some positively determined nature of its own; doing this at once makes Being into a being, even if a very special or unique kind of being, superior to all others—a being such as God is often taken to be. And once Being is made into a being, it joins all other beings, and we are left to seek a ground for this being along with all the rest.

But, one asks, couldn't Being be self-grounding, and so assign itself its own positively determined nature?

Only if that which grounds is not itself grounded, because that which is grounded refers in its dependence to an independent ground. So Being can be “self-grounding” only if it is not uniform or simple, so that one part of itself grounds another part of itself without needing grounding in turn. Not needing grounding, it is then groundless. Yet it is hard to see how one and the same being can be both grounded and groundless, and since Being is not a being at all, it is hard to see how we can talk about two different aspects of something that is not some-thing, not a thing in the first place, but rather no-thing. In fact, as Heidegger points out, the question of why there are beings rather than nothing invokes both Being and Nothing, by considering beings in relation to nothing as the possibility that their lack of existence would entail, and at the same time as that from which they come to be as beings that are but once were not. 20 The question at the same time distinguishes between Being and Nothing simply by the fact that beings are in being, by which Being reveals itself as Being, as the ground of beings, rather than sheer nothing. But as itself groundless, Being cannot be grasped in its own right in the way that the answer of any usual question may be, within the order of answers and questions, grounds and grounded, that holds sway in the realm of beings. Hence, it cannot

19 To put the matter in religious terms, a complete understanding of God both in himself and as creator would require nothing less than the complete obliteration of the gap between humanity and divinity and so, in effect, the obliteration of oneself as distinct from God. This may well be the goal in certain mystical traditions, but not of faith in its more orthodox forms or of faith in the sense here described. 20 Cf. Introduction to Metaphysics , 26-33. 10 supply itself as an answer to a question in the usual way that results in the termination of questioning.

With these thoughts we return to the nature of reason, for it is reason that performs the connection of answers to questions in the usual order of things. Reason reasons by seeking and finding reasons; or more straightforwardly, reason is the power that supplies an answer to a question by linking a ground to that which it grounds. In Aristotle's formulation, reason in this sense is epist ēmē, the truth-producing function of the dianoetic part of the soul that, by linking that which grounds to that which is grounded in a hierarchical chain of logical implication, produces demonstrative knowledge. 21 In Plato's formulation, reason is logistik ē, calculation, but more generally dianoia itself, the discursive intellect exemplified in geometric demonstrations, the purest kind of reasoning from premises to conclusions. 22 But just as epist ēmē for Aristotle depends on nous to apprehend the archai , the principles or starting points of reasoning, 23 dianoia for Plato requires no ēsis , the activity of nous , to move beyond hypotheses to first principles, and above all to the highest principle, the idea of the good, as the ground of all grounds, the source of all beings, and as such always itself beyond being. 24 Aristotle's highest principle, the so-called unmoved mover, while different in important ways from Plato's highest principle, 25 nevertheless shares with the idea of the good the status of being the ultimate arch ē and the highest end of both thinking and desiring, which as such is grasped not through demonstrative reasoning but through the intellectual perception of contemplative nous . Taking the insights of both these thinkers into account, we should revise our earlier suggestion that reasoning in the highest sense be construed as the questioning of Being: more precisely, such questioning, while prompted by reason's searching for grounds, in its engagement with the groundless ground of Being is not a reasoning activity at all, and so not the kind of questioning that reason engages in when engaged in its proper function, but rather something akin to Aristotle's noetic the ōria of the divine unmoved mover, or Plato's no ēsis of the idea of the good.

This questioning, then, is not at all the kind of questioning that can simply be ended with an answer, but rather a questioning that finds its fulfillment only in its continual engagement with the object of questioning—

21 Nicomachean Ethics VI.3 22 Republic 510b-511e, 533b-535a 23 Op. cit., VI.3, 6-8, 11 24 Op. cit. 25 Most importantly, as the highest substance the unmoved mover would seem to be a being, even if the highest being, rather than Being itself, although it may be that when one understands this substance in the way Aristotle intends the ontological distinction reappears. We should also acknowledge that Plato's good, in spite of his characterization of it as beyond being, is regarded by Heidegger (rightly or wrongly) as a being, and a divine being at that. Cf. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology , trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 286. These question are much too large to be explored in the present space, however. 11 which, of course, is not an “object” at all, as one object over against many others and over against a “subject” that might know or possess it, any more than it is a “subject” in the sense of a “subject matter” that provides answers to questions about factual states of affairs. This questioning, then, cannot be the kind of discursive questioning that proposes terms to be confirmed or denied, demands to be met in any pre-determined way. Noetic as opposed to discursive questioning is finally and most purely a stance of open receptivity, a holding open of the mind and soul towards the questioned, towards Being, without imposing any dogmatic determinations upon it. This stance marks a fundamental orientation, and it is from the perspective of one's openness towards it, in the light of Being, however dimly perceived, that one then questions and reasons discursively concerning beings in their relation to Being. Just as Plato's metaphor has it, one may be oriented towards the shadows of the cave or towards the light of the sun, but in seeking and seeing the light, one does not remain in its brilliance alone but returns to see the shadowed beings in its light. Or in Heidegger's terminology, even in our resolute openness ( Gelassenheit ) before Being we do not escape the world of beings but remain Da-Sein and Mit-Sein , existing here and with other beings, In-Der-Welt-Sein , as being-in-the-world—and to do so in the most authentic way requires openness to Being. This orientation of openness is not a merely mute passivity, however, but an active seeking and striving, as we have noted. But to this we can now add that the striving is not to any end other than the perpetuation of the open receptivity to Being that discloses beings in their Being to the being that exists with them in the world. That is, the aim of the most authentic questioning, the questioning that most perfectly reveals the being of the questioner, is not to gain an answer to the question of Being but to continue to ask it without ceasing—because it is the asking of the question that discloses

Being to the being that asks. One can seek a more complete attunement, a less obstructed openness, a more perfect orientation, a more faithful commitment of oneself to Being in and beyond beings, but to seek “more” than this, to seek an “answer,” in other words, is to misunderstand the question and gain less rather than more.

This is not to say, however, that the usual goals and results of religious faith are here excluded in their entirety. In religious terms, the perfection of contemplative questioning would perhaps be equivalent to the beatific vision, though if one interprets the latter as the beholding of a being, even of the being of God, it would fall short of the openness to Being here described. The attunement of one's being with Being, so far as that may be possible and whatever exactly that might mean, corresponds to the union and communion with God or to the elevation of deification. One gains enlightenment by seeing beings in the light of Being. One gains liberation from bondage, specifically to material and ephemeral beings, by understanding their insignificance as such in comparison to the 12 universal sway of Being. Such enlightenment and liberation, in turn, may well preclude the kind of attachment to physical and “worldly” values and pleasures that so often motivates sinful or immoral conduct, as even the desire to seek the former may preclude, or at least weaken, the desire to seek the latter, just as Plato, for example, describes in his metaphor of the diverted stream. 26 And while we are considering the standpoint of religion, we might also note the appropriateness of awe and wonder as attitudes appropriate to the beholding of Being in its uniqueness and transcendence, and to awakening the questioning of Being in the first place, just as Plato and Aristotle observe the significance of wonder as the beginning of philosophy as the love of wisdom. In turn, prayer, as communication with the divine, when it serves as a reminder of the distinctiveness of Being (as panegyric prayer does of God), or when it expresses and strengthens one's orientation away from beings and towards Being—prayer so regarded is entirely compatible with, and indeed is an expression of, the questioning of Being.

To return by way of summary to our original suggestion, then, faith is not incompatible with reason when faith and reason alike are interpreted in terms of the fundamental questioning of Being. While we should preserve a sphere for reason in its more ordinary or proper sense as discursive or deductive thinking in various ways, when we understand a higher order of “reasoning” in the questioning-contemplating of that which transcends all grounds as the groundless Being of beings, such a comportment of mind and soul becomes indistinguishable from faith. For just as the definition of faith requires, the object of such questioning is the unseen reality that yet, in the revealing of itself in and through beings, provides the sufficiently convincing evidence of itself sufficient to ground, as its

“substance,” the hope that can perpetuate the continuation of thinking indefinitely. Such questioning-thinking seeks a desired object and fruitful fulfillment in that object, but we should not understand that fulfillment in terms of an answer to a question in the way one finds within the order of beings, for Being is not the ground of beings in the way that an answer or reason is a ground. Fulfillment is found in the perpetual questioning of this groundless ground, a questioning that therefore takes the form not of ordinary rational discourse but of conscious openness, a receptivity that at the same time seeks to apply what it has received back to the order of beings, to understand them all in the light of the Being that has given rise to them and, in its perpetual self-manifestation and revelation in the world, continues to preserve them into the future.

26 Rep. VI, 485d