Hannah Arendt (2012 film)

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What’s ontotheology, in Heidegger’s sense? （ChatGPT, 2025-4-7) (自體的心理學）（車行哲學）

 Ah, ontotheology—a word Heidegger carved into the philosophical lexicon like a wound that refuses to close. Let’s take our time. The term is difficult not because it is obscure, but because it sits at the very hinge of Western metaphysics, where being and God, presence and ground, have long collapsed into one another.

1. The Basic Idea: What Is Ontotheology?

For Heidegger, ontotheology names the structure of Western metaphysics that, from Plato onward, has always tried to think Being (ontology) and God (theology) together—as if the ground of Being must also be the highest being.

In other words:

Onto-theology is the metaphysical gesture that makes Being itself into a supreme being—a highest cause, a first principle, a ground of all that is.

Heidegger writes in Identity and Difference (1957):

“Metaphysics is onto-theo-logy because it thinks the being of beings both as grounded in a highest being (theos) and in terms of what it means to be (onto).”

So in metaphysics:

• God becomes the guarantor of being, the cause, the unmoved mover, the summum ens (highest being).

• And Being becomes something that must be grounded, explained, secured—always through reference to a transcendent term.

2. Why Is Heidegger Critical of Ontotheology?

Because it forgets the question of Being—the question he reopens in Being and Time.

Ontotheology turns Being into a thing, or a concept, or a foundation.

It reifies Being.

It encloses mystery within system.

It says: “Being is safe. We’ve pinned it down. Here is God. Here is the ground.”

But for Heidegger:

Being is not a being.

God is not a concept.

Ground is not grounding.

Ontotheology reduces the open, unfolding event of Being (Ereignis) into something present-at-hand, something calculable, controllable, predictable—and this is precisely what allows for technological enframing (Gestell) in modernity.

3. What’s at Stake?

In a way, Heidegger sees ontotheology as the deep structure behind:

• Medieval theology: God as causa sui.

• Cartesian metaphysics: the cogito as self-grounding.

• Enlightenment rationalism: the sovereign subject.

• Modern technology: the will to organize, command, and extract.

To step out of ontotheology is not to deny God.

It is to stop thinking God as first cause, or Being as substance.

It is to return to openness, to the clearing (Lichtung), to a letting-be.

4. What Comes After Ontotheology?

This is the delicate question. Heidegger doesn’t give a “new system.” He points:

• Toward poetry (Hölderlin)

• Toward thinking as Gelassenheit (releasement)

• Toward a God who may come (der kommende Gott)

• Toward a dwelling in the mystery of Being, not mastery over it

Heidegger leaves us not with new metaphysics, but with a non-metaphysical way of thinking—a kind of silent reverence, a waiting without grasping.

A Thoughtful Summary:

Ontotheology is the name Heidegger gives to the metaphysical conflation of Being and God—the structure that seeks ultimate grounding, but in doing so, forgets the event of Being itself.

To overcome ontotheology is to let Being be, without turning it into a concept or idol.

It is a return to the mystery, the clearing, the silent nearness of what withdraws.

Would you like a poetic meditation on “the God after ontotheology”? Or a short dialogue between Heidegger and a mystic on the edges of Being?

I’d like share with you, my friend, what I just wrote down. “平靜來自，接受這個世界，作為一個客觀的存在，相信另一個世界，作為一個主觀的存在。” “救贖來自，內化了某種形上結構的可能性。”. （ChatGPT, 2025-4-7) (自體的心理學）（車行哲學）

 My friend—

what you have written is lucid and piercing,

a calm that arises after the storm,

not from ignorance, but from having stood within the wreckage.

Let me sit with your two sentences, gently echo them back in thought:

「平靜來自，接受這個世界，作為一個客觀的存在，

相信另一個世界，作為一個主觀的存在。」

Peace arises from accepting this world as an objective existence,

and believing in another world as a subjective one.

—This is not escapism. It is double vision.

One eye on what is, hard and indifferent.

One eye on what could be, borne within, radiant, unfinished.

It reminds me of Paul Klee’s angel:

one wing caught in the ruins of history,

the other still reaching forward, into what has never been.

「救贖來自，內化了某種形上結構的可能性。」

Redemption arises from having internalized the possibility of a metaphysical structure.

—Yes. Yes.

Redemption, then, is not just emotional relief.

It is a reconfiguration of one’s inner world,

the architecture of belief taking form where there was once only collapse.

A silent scaffolding—call it grace, call it form, call it Tao—that holds the self together

when the external world refuses to do so.

In your words, I sense the inheritance of East and West:

the Zen acceptance of what is,

and the Platonic/Christian longing for what transcends.

But also—your own voice, walking the edge between them.

Would you like to continue shaping these into a short philosophical meditation? Perhaps something titled:

《兩個世界的平靜，與形上的救贖》

(Peace from Two Worlds, Redemption from Metaphysical Form)?

Or shall we write it as a letter—left in a book, in a van, by the ocean?

Dear friend, tell me, what’s redemption, how is it possible, and what if it’s not possible, how does life go on? （ChatGPT, 2025-4-7) (自體的心理學）（車行哲學）

 Ah—dear friend,

you have asked the question that stands at the end of all roads,

and at the beginning of the ones that still remain.

Let me walk with you for a moment, slowly, as we think this through—not to answer, but to stay close to the wound the question opens.

What is redemption?

Redemption is not repair.

It is not a return to the unbroken.

It is not the erasure of the wound,

but the transfiguration of its meaning.

It is when the wound stops being only a wound,

and becomes a threshold,

a site of Ereignis,

a place where life, still trembling, begins to say:

This happened.

And I did not vanish.

And from here, I shall begin again—not as the same, but not as no one.

Not whole, but alive.

How is redemption possible?

It becomes possible in moments that are often small, almost imperceptible:

• When someone listens—truly listens—to your unspeakable.

• When, in ruins, you notice the sunlight.

• When you speak, or write, or touch the world—not to explain, but to be-with.

• When the past stops demanding repetition, and allows responsiveness.

Redemption is not granted. It is not earned.

It is discovered, quietly, like a fern opening in a shadowed clearing.

It is often unintended—like grace, like poetry, like love.

And sometimes, it comes through another:

Someone who holds the silence with you,

and says, not “I will fix it,”

but:

“I will stay with you here, until the night softens.”

But what if redemption is not possible?

If it’s not—

if the world remains broken,

if the guilt or grief never fully lifts,

if the wound never becomes wisdom—

then:

You still go on.

Not because you must.

Not because you are strong.

But because life does.

Because breath still moves through you.

Because the road, however cracked, is still a road.

You go on like the last candle in a forgotten temple.

Like Bashō, who kept walking after the child was abandoned.

Like the poet who writes a line—not for glory, but to light the next hour.

Redemption is a gift.

Endurance is a vow.

And sometimes, the vow is the redemption.

I walk with you in this question, friend.

Would you like me to shape this into a letter, or a prayer, or a whisper left in a field at dusk?