devas

(if this essay appears... well... like blather, please forgive; I’ve been reading Eihei Dogen, rereading Heidegger, and not sleeping...)

“The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa-sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.” - Martin Heidegger

In his later philosophy, perhaps as a man who had courted hell on Earth and been made to see his folly, Martin Heidegger explicitly introduced a realm of the divine, of the gods, and set it as an aspect of his fourfold integration of being. It was (I think) both a desire to return to an authenticity (innocence) as well as a deepening of insight. In these writings, the way of our being is still the being-in-the-world of his earlier work, but the world is the fourfold world of heaven and earth, gods and mortals, each interpenetrating each in a dynamic unity that is also a plural.

Leaving aside the particularities of Heidegger's fourfold¹ , I think that a re-enchantment of the world, or re-spiriting of nature (to use an idea from contemporary Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming) is sorely needed in these times of war, oppression, exploitation, cruelty, and threatened ecological collapse. The return to recognition of a spiritual dimension to the life of the universe might also point a way towards realising a liberating truth. And it need not be a spirituality build on the exaggerations and distortions of some historically influential brands of metaphysics.

Nietzsche asked “isn’t this world enough?” as a reply to the metaphysics of radical transcendence which he (I think correctly) saw as leading inevitably to the malaise of nihilism in European intellectual life of his day. Building up with the human intellect a conceptual schema towards a radically transcendent deity-as per some strands of Platonism or Aristotelianism and as per Thomism- once it was suspected of being little more than a vain overvaluation of the products of analytical thinking, the entire metaphysical edifice was in danger of collapsing. And once collapsed, an abyss of doubt opened up which triggered despair, thence a negative nihilism.

Thus, the ‘god’ of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is the god of the intellect, of the scholastic philosophers and metaphysicians. The God that survives is God-as-Reality which envelopes singular and plural, subject and object, nature and humanity, matter and mind, permanence and impermanence. God-as-Reality is neither merely transcendent, nor merely immanent, but immanently transcendent. God-as-Reality is the non-dual identity of heaven and earth, gods and mortals, of the universe and the self, the uncaused actuality of total existence.

In less theistically-oriented language -

The world is sufficient, but not the merely objective world. The merely objective world is the world of conventional meaning, that is relatively understood, and analysed. It is the world as it is made into the object of perception, and is profoundly limited by human cognition, is perfumed by human desires, and aversions, and is flecked with the suffering entailed by the human condition. However , the world that is not merely objective, not merely perceived, nor limited, nor merely perfumed by human desires, and aversions, and flecked with the suffering of the human condition is sufficient. It is sufficient in that it lacks nothing, is uncaused being, envelopes all that appears and remains unapparent, all realms and times. It is sufficient as total actuality, entirely present.

(Perhaps, there is no need to transcendentalise the Soterion)

1. not all ancient conceptions of the gods placed them ‘up above’ in heaven- from what I know of the very ancient people of my own country, the gods in Ireland were regarded as chthonic, in other words, they were ‘down below’ in an earthly otherworld