Westphal on Onto-theology

Merold Westphal offers this helpful definition of "onto-theology" in an article found here:

"The term is often used by assistant professors who have appointed themselves campus terrorists and, alas, by senior scholars who should be more careful, as a kind of sci-fi conceptual zapper. You aim it at any theology archaic enough to affirm a transcendent, personal creator and vaporize it by intoning the magic word, 'onto-theology.'

"But what do we find in Heidegger? He derives the term from Aristotle, who had sought to develop a science of being as such, not this dimension of being or that region, but being qua being. But to carry out his project, subsequently known as ontology, Aristotle discovered that he needed to posit God, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to be sure, but the impersonal, oblivious Un- moved Mover. With this, ontology becomes theology, or, as Heidegger puts it, onto-theology. The key idea is that there is a highest being who is the key to the meaning of the whole of being. . . . Heidegger describes onto-theology a bit more specifically than as the claim that there is a highest being who is the key to the meaning of the whole of being. Onto-theology occurs when philosophy allows God to become a theme of its discourse only on its terms and in the service of its project. Philosophy�s project is to render the whole of being fully intelligible to human understanding, to have the world at its disposal, first conceptually and then practically. Thus onto-theology may begin in metaphysical systems like Aristotle�s, Spinoza�s, and Hegel�s, but it is in modernity�s wedding of science and technology that onto-theology has its greatest triumph, placing the world at its disposal, first conceptually and then practically."

According to Westphal, Heidegger has three main objections to onto-theology:

"First, it deprives the world of its mystery. Second, it gives us a God not worthy of worship. In a famous passage, Heidegger complains that before the causa sui (a name for the God of onto-theology that emphasizes the need for an explainer that doesn�t need to be explained) no one would be tempted to pray or to sacrifice and that this God evokes neither awe nor music and dance. Onto-theology is hostile to piety.

"Third, having deprived the world of both its mystery and of a God worthy of worship, onto-theology opens the way for the unfettered self-assertion of the will to power in the form of modernity, namely the quest of science and technology to have everything at human disposal. This is the ultimate hybris of western humanity, in which, under the banner of modernity, it arrogates to itself the place of Plato�s Good and the Christian God. Heidegger describes this self-coronation as an attack, an assault, an uprising, an insurrection."

Christianity, Westphal argues, is not a form of onto-theology, since it does not empty the world or God of mystery and since it does not endorse the will to power or place God under human control. Much the contrary, of course. Yet, he warns, "Christian theology, against its better judgment, often has strong onto-theological tendencies. Our philosophical theologies, especially when they focus on the 'metaphysical' attributes of God and marginalize the �moral�Eattributes, can easily lapse, both in appearance and in fact, into trying to make everything clear, thereby producing a God not obviously related to prayer, worship, and witness. And even when our systematic theologies subordinate philosophical analysis to biblical exegesis, they can and sometimes do become systems in an onto-theological sense."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 19, 2005 at 12:17 PM

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