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THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE DISCOVERY OF FINITUDE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF : FROM KANT THROUGH HOLDERLIN TO HEIDEGGER Jacob Potempski Cultural Studies Trent University [email protected]

The pronouncement of the death of god of God. This is why he calls the history of is usually accredited to Nietzsche, but in fact a history of "onto-theo-logy."3 the has a much longer history. As Heidegger's book on Kant begins what he Heidegger points out, already in 1802 calls the "destructuring" of this history, "Hegel named the feeling on which rests the which takes the form of creative re- religion of the modern period—the feeling interpretations of some of its major figures, that God himself is dead…"1 However, in with the aim of making explicit their implicit the history of philosophy, the decisive crisis assumptions.4 While Kant is critiqued as a in theological is to be found in the part of this , Heidegger maintained work of Kant. In the Critique of Pure that he was also the first to break with it. , Kant famously set out to "deny The break is defined by the discovery of the knowledge in order to make room for faith."2 radical finitude of human , which Despite this , by demonstrating the marks the death of god. Kant's critique bears impossibility of knowing god, Kant upon the possibility of knowing Being in undermined the very faith he sought to itself, the Being of god; and it is carried out secure. On the hand, it is true that even from the standpoint of finitude, which he in the domain of knowledge god is defines as a radical limitation of knowledge. "resurrected" in the form of a transcendent Importantly, the critique that Heidegger . The death of god appears only as a extracts from Kant bears not only upon the furtive moment in the Critique, immediately of god as a being outside and beyond covered up, as if Kant could not but draw humanity, but simultaneously upon the god- back from the abyss opened up by the like modern subject. As Heidegger puts it in . The radical implications of this "The Word of Nietzsche: ':'" "critical" moment are developed only little has changed if "the God . . . has retroactively, through the interpretations of disappeared from his authoritative position Kant given by Hölderlin and, especially, in the suprasensory " only to be Heidegger. replaced by the subject, only to have the For Heidegger, the question of subject rise up into that authoritative traditional metaphysics is the question of the position.5 In other words, god is resurrected Being of , which is simultaneously the question concerning the suprasensible being 3 , "The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics," in and 1 Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is , trans. (Chicago: The Dead,'" in The Question Concerning and University of Chicago Press, 2002). Other Essays, transl. William Lovitt (New York: 4 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Harper & Row, 1977), 58. Metaphysics, transl. Richard Taft (Bloomington, 2 , , transl. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990). Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan & Co. 5 Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead,'" Ltd, 1963), 29. 69.

Symposia, 4, 1 (2012), pp. 1-11. © The Author 2012. Published by University of Toronto. All reserved. Potempski | 2 when the subject is endowed with the same through a secular philosophy of the possibility of transcendence. For many individual/subject, but through a modern the death of god Heideggerian form of negative .9 implies precisely this new possibility of The death of god, understood along transcendence for the individual. For these lines, signals a new relation between example, for Sartre and his followers, that the human and the divine. Following god is dead means that the individual is Hölderlin, whom Heidegger encounters in thrown back upon his own resources, and his later work, it will be characterized as a must assume responsibility for his mutual betrayal. Hölderlin finds the actions.6 While this responsibility is a paradigm of this betrayal in ' burden, it is also absolute freedom. Oedipus, in the vagabondage of this figure Heidegger argues that Nietzsche understands of abandonment.10 Indeed, for Hölderlin, the the event similarly.7 One might call this the of Oedipus, despite being ancient, is secular interpretation of the death of god. paradigmatic of the modern subject's Throughout his work, Heidegger critiques divisive relation to god. It anticipates the the modern philosophies of the subject for Kantian . It is the modern tragedy their (onto)theological presuppositions; in par excellence. However, what is essential Kantian terms, for their uncritical dogma.8 in this regard is the fact that the mutual Drawing on Heidegger's reading of Kant, betrayal that separates Oedipus from god is, I will argue that the critique of the dogma of like Heidegger's notion of difference, a onto-theo-logy is consummated when the relation that joins while separating. dead god is not simply brushed aside, as part The relation is grounded in the finitude of the gesture that throws the subject back of human being, which, in the history of upon its own resources, but is affirmed as an philosophy, Kant was the first to discover. I absence. The hypothesis is that only when will therefore begin with an elaboration of the subject maintains a relation with an Heidegger's analysis of the Kantian element that transcends it, can it be discovery, an analysis that is developed prevented from assuming "the authoritative within the purview of the philosophy position." The element that transcends it introduced in , before must not be thought of as god, the considering Oedipus, and his discordant suprasensible being of traditional thought. relation to the divine. Rather, it must be understood as the dead god, and that means as an immanent, Radical finitude and transcendence irreducible . In other words, the (Heidegger's Kant) dogma of onto-theo-logy is overcome, not Traditional metaphysics divides everything into two types of being: on the one hand, contingent beings, which are 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, is a , transl. Carol Macomber (Yale University Press, 2007). 9 The relation between Heidegger's thought and the 7 Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead.'" negative theology of the ancients falls beyond the 8 In this regard, Heidegger's thought resonates with purview of this paper. I argue that Heidegger's that of recent advocates of post-secularism, who thought leads to a negative form of theology in the claim that (for example) "we have never been sense that it is predicated on the idea of the absence secular," because of the theological presuppositions of god. undergirding secularism. However, from Heidegger's 10 Friedrich Hölderlin, Remarques sur Œdipe. point of view, as I will try to show, we could also say Remarques sur Antigone, French transl. François that we have never been theist, because god could Fédier (Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions 10/18, never be present, except perhaps as absence. 1965).

3 | Potempski determined by something external to them, Kant begins the first Critique by and are, consequently, perishable; on the contrasting human (which he also other, the original, self-determining Being calls the sensibility) to the intuition of god (the famous causa sui) which exists outside (if there were a god). The latter is "intuitus of time. The latter is the Being of pure originarius."13 It is creative, in the sense that thought, which is the realm of ; the it does not depend on anything. In contrast, former is sensible being, the realm of finite intuition is "intuitus derivativus."14 It illusion. In theological terms, this is the is dependent upon beings, beings which distinction between the suprasensible realm exist outside and in their own right, and of heaven, and the mortal world of from which its representations are derived. embodied creatures. Juxtaposed to the This means that there is a passivity in every kingdom of god, the world of 'his' creatures human act of representation, which marks appears as a "vale of tears."11 Heidegger the fact that something had to be there— argues that Kant subverts this hierarchical before that intuiting act of representation.15 dichotomy, by conceptualising it neither as a In other words, human intuition is relation of opposition, nor of identity, but contingent. It is determined within time. It one of internal difference. Finitude proves to was not there before; it has not always been be this relation of difference itself. The there; and it could not be. In the language of result is that the suprasensible world Being and Time, we are "thrown" into disappears altogether, and this world, our situations that we did not create.16 We exist world, reveals the possibility of an in contingent situations and are subject to immanent transcendence.12 change by virtue of things that affect us. This does not imply empirical . It is an ontological claim, which implies that

11 "God is the name for the realm of and ideals. all of our representations take place in the This realm of the suprasensory has been considered world, in a world that provides that place for since , or more strictly speaking, since the late us. The world is there, given, by way of the Greek and Christian interpretation of Platonic intuition, before any act of will or . philosophy, to be the true and genuinely real world. Moreover, what is there, what is given, is In contrast to it the sensory world is only the world down here, the changeable, and therefore merely always concretely situated. In Kant's apparent, unreal world. The world down here is the language, what is not determined in vale of tears in contrast to the mountain of everlasting concreto, which means within time, is not at bliss in the beyond. If, as still happens in Kant, we all. name the sensory world the physical in the broader In contrast a god-like intuition, insofar as sense, then the suprasensory is the metaphysical world." Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is it is absolutely creative, would not be Dead,'" 61. subject to things acting on it from the 12 In this paper, I leave aside the question if outside. God would not be god in the Heidegger's reading is an accurate representation of metaphysical sense if he existed in time. Kant, and focus on the logic of Kant is sceptical about the possibility of Heidegger's own ideas as they are developed through this reading. As I mentioned earlier, Heidegger's reading of Kant is an instance of what he called the 13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 90. "destructuring" of the history of philosophy. 14 Ibid. Although an elaboration of this is beyond the 15 "According to its , finite intuition must be purview of this paper, the reader should keep in solicited or affected by that which is intuitable in it." that Heidegger does not aim to relay, with Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 18. verisimilitude, Kant's explicit formulations. Rather, 16 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, transl. Joan he aims at a creative retrieval of a problem that (he Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York argues) implicitly governs the Critique. Press, 1996) 123-130.

Potempski | 4 such an intuition. From an As I mentioned at the start of this epistemological/ontological point of view, it section, for Heidegger, the main problem of is a "mere concept" (or a "metaphysical the first Critique is the possibility of chimera").17 In other words, god cannot be transcendence within finitude. He writes: known. "When unfolded the question reads: How However, the Kantian "sensibility" (or can finite human pass beyond "intuition") does not correspond to what the (transcend) the being in advance when this tradition defined as the merely contingent being is not only something it did not create of beings. It is, in its finitude, itself, but something at which it must be irreducibly passive. Nonetheless, being- directed in order to exist as Dasein."20 The affected is a capacity of the human being. answer is found within the nature of the Kant calls it a faculty, the faculty of inner sensibility, the passivity of which does not sense. In other words, the sensibility is not prevent it from being an active faculty. simply a receptacle, at the mercy of The fact that the sensibility proves to be whatever solicits it. Rather, this passive active means that reason is implicated in it. faculty constitutes an original openness to For Kant, we must recall, asides from the things. It is only insofar as we (finite, faculty of sense, we have the cogito. The "sensible" beings) open to the world that cogito is the self-determining faculty of objects can appear to us and that we can be thought. He argues, however, that the one affected by them. Heidegger writes that the faculty is without the other. There is sensibility, understood as the inner sense, is no pure self-determining, self-causing an original "turning toward" that first lets the reason, because our representations depend being that was already there come forth and upon situations. Reason is thus mediated by show itself.18 The sensibility provides the the derivative intuition. On the other hand, horizon—the original openness—which first reason is there along with the enables being affected. In this way, although sensibility, because nothing can affect the it is finite, the "intuitus derivatives" is self, nothing can be there before it, unless it "original" and in a certain (restricted) sense is recognized by the self in the first place. creative. However, we should not The recognition or determination of understand this "originality" as belonging to something as something, which happens in a subjective will that imposes an innate and through human reason, is the original conceptual frame upon the world. The turning toward that—as Heidegger says— sensibility remains "a receptivity;" yet there first lets the being that was already there is an activity proper to its passivity.19 come forth and show itself. This co-implication of reason and the 17 For Kant, what is not given 'in concreto,' that is, sensibility shows that affection is always what is not mediated by the intuition of time, is a self-affection. While Kant sometimes speaks mere thought entity. For example Descartes' notion of of the cogito as a faculty that is separate the cogito, from which he infers the of the from "the affections" of the sensibility, I, the a-temporal existence of a creative subject, is Heidegger insists that it is nothing other than only a logical category. To understand such 21 abstractions as having a correlative existence, which self-affection. That the self affects itself is also done in metaphysical arguments for the , is what Kant calls a "transcendental illusion." 20 Ibid. 30. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 92-100, 382. 21 The notion of self-affection is developed in the 18 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, chapter "Time as Pure Self-Affection and the 19. Temporal Character of the Self." Heidegger, Kant 19 Ibid. 18-21. and the Problem of Metaphysics, 132-137. Kant

5 | Potempski means that it its own activity as However, in order to further develop the that of an other; an other that affects it from philosophical/theological implications of within. In other words, the self is constituted finitude defined in this way, we have to turn in and through a relation to an otherness that to Heidegger's later work, where he divides it from itself. Thus, as it was for encounters Hölderlin. Rimbaud, for Kant the "I" is an other.22 The unity of the self conceived in this Oedipus and the turning of the face of god way is a unity of difference. The self is ("le détournement categorique") constituted as a juncture of two The structure of self-affection brings heterogeneous faculties. But since the together two heterogeneous figures. The faculty of intuition constitutes the finite self is passive, passive in its very ontological link between the self and the activity. Its own activity is "always already" outside world, the unity of the two faculties subject to the action of an other. This other is simultaneously the unity of self and is irreducibly different from the self and yet, world. in and through this difference, they are It is by discovering a fundamental link brought into relation. For the later between the finite intuition and self- Heidegger, this otherness within the self is, determining reason that Kant is able to simultaneously, the otherness of god. overcome the hierarchical oppositions of Heidegger elaborates this paradoxical traditional metaphysics. Insofar as the relation to god when he turns to Hölderlin. human being harbours in its finitude the But it is who shows the possibility of an active and creative relation connection of this later work to the earlier to the very world that affects it from analysis of Kant, in his Heideggerian without, it ceases to appear as a simply reading of Hölderlin's remarks on Oedipus. passive creature (lost, as it were, "in the vale According to this reading, Oedipus of tears"). On the other hand, insofar as exemplifies the modern (post-Kantian) reason includes an inner reference to subject's relation to god. finitude, there is no absolute, self-causing For Hölderlin, the tragedy of Oedipus is being, no being beyond time. Transcendence exceptional because it reveals the extreme becomes immanent to the finite realm. divisiveness of man and God. Oedipus is the great sinner, who forsakes and is forsaken by God. Of course, the mutual betrayal of humans and gods is a common theme in himself does not develop the concept of self-affection Greek . However, it is as though the as thoroughly, and does not seem to give it as much betrayal is introduced only in order to re- importance. Nonetheless, he did write that the establish unity, a unity that is gained in intuition of time "can be nothing but the mode in which the mind is affected through its own activity death. Death, writes Hölderlin, is the (namely, through this positing of its representation), "aorgic" and "panic" unity, the dissolution of and so is affected by itself . . ." individuality and difference in "the one- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 87-88. whole," which constitutes the core of Greek 22 It is that makes this connection .23 What makes Oedipus an exception is between Kant and Rimbaud, when discussing the form of time as the differential unity of the cogito and the fact that, even once his sin is out in the the self, in what strikes me as a Heidegger-inspired reading of Kant. Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, transl. 23 Jean Beaufret, "Hölderlin et Sophocle," in Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam Hölderlin, Remarques sur Œdipe. Remarques sur (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Antigone (Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions 10/18, vii-viii. 1965), 16-17.

Potempski | 6 open, he does not die; the sky refuses, as strangest mutation, which he [Hölderlin] Valéry would put it, "to declare itself."24 names . . . a categorical abduction."28 The Oedipus, once betrayed, is made to assume French word is détournement, le his solitude, his separateness, his individual détournement categorique. "Abduction" difference, and to go on in the absence of may be a good for translation, God. because of the implication of violence; but it Tracing Hölderlin's references to Kant, misses the many connotations of the French Beaufret suggests the there is a piety in this which are important for Beaufret: diversion, insistence on separation (the separation of turning or looking away, mis-appropriation. self and god) which mirrors the piety of Beaufret hears in this notion an echo of the Kant, who was "so attentive in his Kantian "categorical" imperative. The 'separatism' to maintain the distinction of . . . Kantian moral law, the law of the phenomena and noumena."25 This is the categorical imperative, is devoid of any distinction of the cogito and the sensibility. empirical content. Beaufret writes that the What is remarkable about Oedipus, law is in fact the ban on any "intuitive however, and about the Kantian distinction, representation" of god.29 The infinite is not simply its divisiveness, but its separation of which Hölderlin speaks paradoxical nature. To put it differently, corresponds to the divisive relation that is what is remarkable is the way in which, for constitutive of the self, the relation which both Kant and Sophocles, the notion of separates reason from the intuition. For this limit, as that which separates the self from relation implies that the "I" of pure reason god, the limit of finitude, "becomes an can never be represented or experienced enigma."26 In reference to both Kant and directly. It, that is, the self-determining Sophocles, Hölderlin wrote that the ground of reason, can only be represented by "unlimited separation" (the absolute limit) way of an abduction, a diversion, an was there for an "unlimited becoming one;" alienation, in the figure of an other. Le and that "the unlimited becoming one of détournement categorique is thus a man and god [the "aorgic panic" which is categorical withdrawal of god, in the face of the essence of Greek tragedy] purifies itself the irreducible difference of the finite by the unlimited separation."27 creature that cannot but (mis)appropriate it. Beaufret writes that in order to But if the moral law, the ground of reason, understand this enigma of the infinite refers to an absence, it is an absence with separation, we must heed the fact that for which the self must maintain a relation, an Hölderlin the coupling [l'accouplement] of absence that it must bear. The law equally the human and the divine involves "the forbids the self to seal itself, as it were, within its own individual identity. In other 24 Ibid. words, the self is (and, from the moral point 25 This translation is mine. Here is the (almost) of view, ought to be) abducted in turn by the complete original phrase: « On ne peut s'empêcher ici action of the absent god. de penser à nouveau à Kant et à la piété kantienne, si attentive dans son « séparatisme » à maintenir la This is why for Hölderlin, Oedipus, who distinction entre ce que le philosophe appelle lives this unlimited separation, is not simply phénomène et noumène … de sorte que ses principa an atheist. He is "atheos," which is domestica ne transgressent leurs limites pour aller, something very different.30 He maintains an dans la confusion, porter atteinte à l'immaculé que doit rester le monde intelligible. » Beaufret, "Hölderlin et Sophocle," 20. 28 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 12-13. 29 Ibid. 14-15. 27 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 16.

7 | Potempski essential relation with the god that abandons affection. God and the self turn away from him. He makes this abandonment his own, one another, yet catch a glimpse of each which means that his very being now other in this very turning: like faces seen in corresponds to something with which it profile. cannot correspond. To assume and endure What makes Oedipus a precursor to the the absence of god: this is the significance of modern (or even, as Hölderlin would have it, the interminable wandering to which a quintessentially modern drama) is, to be Oedipus is consigned; the significance of his sure, the theme of the withdrawal of god. prolonged passion (suffering) and of his The tragedy prefigures the modern "death of infinite displacement. Displacement is the god."32 But for Hölderlin and for Heidegger very movement that links him to the missing the death of god is not a secular drama. It is god. It is the movement that forces him a death that must be endured. God's absence outside of himself, and brings him into must be internalized, in other words, such relation with the irreducible alterity of the that the self remains fractured, ex-posed to divine. This is what Hölderlin means by the an outside. Oedipus, in his vagabondage, "unlimited becoming one" (of man and god) tied to a fleeing god that eternally uproots – purified (of any facile or false identity) by him, is the image of the modern self. If here the infinite separation. one might, once again, re-apply Rimbaud's In meditations inspired by the of poetic formula, one could say that it is in the Hölderlin, Heidegger understands the face of god, the absent god, that the "I" withdrawal of god (a constant theme in becomes an other. Hölderlin's writing) as a form of address. The withdrawal is not nothing. In god and time withdrawing god addresses himself to the The relation between the human and the human being. In this sense god's absence is a divine is ultimately to be understood in mode of presence. God is there as an absent terms of time. Hölderlin writes that at the presence. To put it differently, god is that extreme limit of suffering, at the crux of the which escapes the self, but the self cannot division, nothing remains, Oedipus and god 31 are nothing, but time: "the pure conditions of escape that which escapes it. 33 The eternal diversion of the divine and time," time as a pure and empty form. the ceaseless flight of the self are two sides What is at stake here is not, however, the of the same Janus-faced event, like reason quantitative time that we use as a measure. and the sensibility in the structure of self- Rather, it is time or temporality understood as a synthesis of past, present, and future; as a relation of memory and forgetting. 31 Heidegger has written a great deal on Hölderlin and Heidegger understands the being of the absence of god. But perhaps the most significant text is the monumental Contributions to Philosophy human being in terms of time. He credits (From Enowning). The term "enowning" is an Kant as the first to discover our temporal attempt to translate Ereignis, which is also translated essence. The notion of self-affection, which as event and appropriation. Heidegger's later thinking he extracts from Kant, implies, firstly, that turns upon this notion, exploiting its rich etymology. we are affected by things given beforehand. In this text he shows the link between the enowning of Being by man and of man by Being, the event of It implies that we are "thrown" (in the mutual appropriation, and Hölderlin's theme of the language of Being and Time) into situations, betrayal/withdrawal of god. which we, finite creatures, did not create. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), transl. and Kenneth May (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University 32 Beaufret, "Hölderlin et Sophocle," 17. Press, 1999). 33 Ibid. 21.

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However, we access these situations through Heidegger's later work, as a model for the possibilities of action that we project into thinking about the relation between the them. They are never given simply as human and the divine. There is, in other "things in themselves." The situations that words, a becoming god of man and a are given beforehand confront us as a past in becoming man of god. This proposition does which we are always already embedded. The not imply that man becomes god or that a free possibilities that we project into them god-like man is constituted in and through confront us a future towards which the past time. God, understood on the basis of the opens (or can open). But just as situations temporality of human being, is not a figure, and possibilities, in Kantian terms, the a person, or an eternal realm lying beyond sensibility and the cogito, are not simply our world. God becomes the openness of opposed; past and future are not juxtaposed unforeseen possibility, which spreads itself like instants that we isolate when we try to out before the human being, like the vast and determine the exact length of a moment. In empty sky.36 human existence, the past is always turning The possibility of the future does not into the future and the future into the past. belong to the human being. The subject does The time of existence is an incessant not own or master it. It is always other, other process, which we fail to understand when than what we expect it to be. In this sense we represent it as a succession of measured alone is the future a future, that is, a not yet instants.34 The process is more circular than given possibility. Nonetheless, it is a linear. In Being and Time, Heidegger uses an possibility towards which the human being apt expression to capture the circle of time: strives, and which nourishes it, by providing being is always already not yet itself.35 In it with the freedom to create a new world. other words, being (the being of human From the standpoint of this philosophy being) is always already past or always of time "god" is the memory of something already embedded in a past; however the that has always been there, given (like a gift) past itself is always already turning into the beforehand. But the memory can never be future, since it is inseparable from the accessed in itself, because it has always appropriation that projects it in a new already been displaced by forgetting. It can direction. As the expression makes clear, the never become present, except perhaps as an future takes precedence. However, it is absence. The flip or correlative side of this inextricably linked to the past. It emerges absent past is the future (the not yet) towards out of the past and continually falls back which the forgetting of memory opens. That into it. The future is more "original," but in is to say, "god" has always been there, but the sense that it has to be perpetually only as that which is to come.37 retrieved from the past. The becoming past of the future, the 36 Regarding Hölderlin's god who is "nothing but becoming future of the past, serves, in time, pure and empty time," Beaufret writes: "Il n'est plus que ce que Baudelaire nommera 'l'azur du ciel immense et rond' et Valéry 'cette immense horloge de 34 Heidegger contrasts the temporality of existence lumière qui mesure ce qu'elle manifeste et manifeste with the conventional conceptualization of time as a ce qu'elle mesure'...". ["He is no longer anything but measure in Division Two, section IV and VI, of that which Baudelaire names 'the azure of the Being and Time. immense, round sky' and Valéry 'that immense clock 35 The exact translation of the expression is: "being- of light that measures what it manifests and manifest ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world." By what it measures'…"]. Beaufret, "Hölderlin et "being-ahead-of-itself" Heidegger means being Sophocle," 21. projected into the not yet of the future. 37 The theological philosophies of Jean-Luc Marion, Heidegger, Being and Time, 179. who thinks of god in terms of a concept of the gift or

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The Kantian revolution and the idea of suprasensuous and the sensuous. Instead of 'perpetual revolution' opposing the two terms and subordinating In conclusion, I would like to consider the one to the other (for example, both the epistemological and the ethical subordinating the world to god) he implications of what is known as the introduces the notion of difference. Kantian Copernican revolution in thought. Difference is not, by any means, a weak The latter is usually defined as the turn away relation. Difference brings the from the towards the subject: while transcendental and the empirical, god and traditional philosophy argued that truth the self, into relation in their heterogeneity. resides in objects (in "things in themselves") In other words, it does not negate the Kant, we are told, argued that it resides differences of the related terms, or the within the subject, in the form of a priori difference of the subordinated term. schemas of thought. However, following Oedipus, for example, is not determined by Heidegger, I have emphasised that what is god; nor do they confront one another as two revolutionary and what is most important in opposed, self-determining wills. Opposition Kant is the notion of radical finitude, and the and subordination are two sides of the same death of god that comes with it. Moreover, coin: both fail to establish an internal as we have seen, Kant allows us to think of a accord, a communication of the new relation to god, which is grounded in heterogeneous.38 the finitude of being. Lastly, I would like to consider the What does it mean that the notion of god ethical or practical implications of the is grounded in finitude? It means that, after Kantian revolution. With the help of having shown that the traditional idea of god Heidegger, we have extracted from Kant a is a "mere concept," Kant revealed the radical critique of the dogma of theology. possibility of transcendence within finite The notion of the betrayal of god has shown existence. The epistemological value of this that, in this new relation to the divine, the lies in the fact that we have replaced a human being is no longer subordinated to metaphysical chimera with a concept that is the will of god. But Kant's critique is also, as grounded in the nature of human existence. we have seen, a critique of the dogma of This does not mean, however, that god is transcendent . The self does not rationalized or reduced to an object of take the place of god; it does not become the knowledge. Insofar as god remains hidden, self-determining origin of being. What "he" cannot become an object of prevents the self from assuming this position representation. In other words, by virtue of of authority is the memory of the absent god. being present as an absence, as the not yet, By maintaining a relation with the god that god is a source of mystery. God becomes an escapes it, the self must not take itself as its unknowable, elusive other; an agent of model. Rather, it must lose its identity in the surprise. unforeseen. Kant overcomes the dualism that the tradition established between the 38 The idea that Kant introduces the notion of difference, in the form of a temporal fracture in the givenness of being; and of Levinas and Derrida, who "I," in order to establish the identity of thought and conceive the divine as the "a-venir" (the eternally to being; and that this is the true sense of his Copernican come); have their origin in the Heideggerian revolution; is also developed by Gilles Deleuze. reflections on god and time, which are scattered Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, transl. throughout his later writings, and which I have tried Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, to synthesize here. 1994) 85-91.

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The nature of the existence of the self significance of this rupture with the past, that is constituted in relation to an absent which makes of both Kant and Oedipus a god is aptly captured by the poetic notion of révolté [rebel], lies in the fact that it creates perpetual revolution. A self that is divided a future life: that is, it creates a form of life from itself by time, whose very interiority defined by the openness to the future.40 ("the inner sense of time") is an irreducible Oedipus, who is "césuré jusqu'à lui-même" schism, a self that is infinitely exposed to the [fractured in his very being],41 must unforeseen, is a self that ought never to internalize the caesura. He must remember become "too old for its victories." To put it the death of god and remain faithful to it; differently, to remember the absent god is to and that means remaining faithful to a open oneself to the unforeseen, and to exist tortuous infidelity; it means remembering to in a state of perpetual renewal. forget. If the vagabond wandering to which This is the imperative that Hölderlin and Oedipus is consigned after the speech of Heidegger find in Kant. For Hölderlin, Kant Tiresias is paradigmatic of the life of the marks a caesura in the history of the West. subject after Kant, this is because it reflects With the "categorical withdrawal" of god, he the life of a man who is endlessly torn from undermines the epistemological, ontological, himself and his world. Oedipus lives the and ethical basis of Western culture. It is in repetition of forgetting. Taking up residence this sense that Kant brings about a veritable beneath the horizon of the unforeseen, he revolution. This event finds its correlate, or lives a perpetual revolution.42 its dramatic expression, in the caesura that fractures Oedipus and his world. In the 40 Beaufret, "Hölderlin et Sophocle," 19, 23. 41 tragedy, the precise point at which the Ibid. 25. 42 The death of god is, on the one hand, a historical caesura appears is marked by the speech of event, accomplished, within philosophy, in the work Tiresias, which reveals to Oedipus the of Kant and subsequently in that of Hölderlin and concealed truth that had haunted him since Heidegger (as well as that of Hegel and Nietzsche). time immemorial: the betrayal of god.39 The However, just as the speech of Tiresias reveals to Oedipus something that has already taken place; Kant 39 Tiresias is the blind prophet who informs Oedipus revealed something that had always been the case. of the fact that he has in fact killed his own father and God had never been present to man, except as an has been married to his mother, thereby fulfilling the absence: a longing, a hope, a possibility. Nonetheless, god's oracle. the revelation constitutes a veritable revolution. For we can think this way only after Kant, Hölderlin, and Heidegger; and this thought has changed many of us, in the West, profoundly. Bibliography

Beaufret, Jean. “Hölderlin et Sophocle.” In Hölderlin: Remarques sur Œdipe. Remarques sur Antigone. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions 10/18, 1965. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. -----. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. -----. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth May. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999.

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-----. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. -----. “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics.” In Identity and Difference. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. -----. “The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead.'” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Remarques sur Œdipe. Remarques sur Antigone. Translated by François Fédier. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions 10/18, 1965. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1963. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. Yale University Press, 2007.