Reality in the Name of God, or, Divine Insistence: An Essay on Creation, Infinity, and the Ontological Implications of Kabbalah

Front matter

NOAH HORWITZ in the Name of God

Reality

REALITY IN THE NAME OF GOD, OR DIVINE INSISTENCE

Table Of Contents

INTRODUCTION: From Kabbalah to 1 Correlationism and Beyond §1. Creation and Infinity 1 §2. Cognitio Dei Experimentalis 2 §3. Our Dear Friend Atheism 5 CHAPTER ONE: Critique of Philosophical 14 Theology §4. The Critique of Onto-theo-logy 14 §5. The Levinasian Lure 19 §6. The Thought of Jean-Luc Marion: 32 Being Given (only to human consciousness) §7. Contra the Process Theologians 43 §8. An Imperfect Logic: Charles 52 Hartshorne’s Panentheism CHAPTER TWO: The Kabbalah of Being 59 §9. Badiou’s First Thesis: Being is Sets 59 §10. What is an Extensional Set? 62 §11. The Second Thesis: ‘The One is Not’ 65 §12. The Infinite Made Finite: The 70 Meaning of the Transfinite §13. Creation from Numbers (Sets/Letters): 78 The Sefirot §14. Creation from Letters (Sets/Names): 85 Sefer Yetzirah §15. The God of Cantorianism 97 §16. The Ontological/Modal Proof of 105

Divine Insistence §17. Divine Insistence 111

§18. Nothingness/The Void and its Mark: The Holy Name of God

CHAPTER THREE: ‘From It to Bit’: Informational Ontology §21. All is Mathematizable §22: The Holy Name as the Primordial Bit

An Ontology of Information

§23. Against the Ontology of the Virtual (For it as Epistemology)

§24. Information Inside-Out: Mind and Matter

§25. Is Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science a Science of Kabbalistic Creation?

CHAPTER FOUR: The Resurrection of the Dead and the Event of the Name

§26. Free Will

§27. Critique and Application: Quentin Meillassoux and the Contingency of Creation

§28. The Resurrection of the Dead

§29. The Event of the Name

EPILOGUE §30. ‘On that Day, God and God’s Name will be One’ §31. The Name of Prayer

WORKS CITED

ABBREVIATIONS

NKS

TDR

TI TO

After Finitude

Bergsonism

Being and Event

Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness

Badiou: A Subject to Truth

The Creative Mind

Difference and Repetition

Ecrits: A Selection

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis

Guide for the Perplexed

God Without Being

How Do We Recognize Structuralism?

The Logic of Perfection

Kabbalah of Creation: The Mysticism of Isaac Luria, Founder of Modern Kabbalah

Matter and Memory

A New Kind of Science

Process and Reality

Speech and Phenomena

Sefer Yetzirah

The Bahir

The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority The Trace of the Other

Zohar Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Volume 1

From Kabbalah to Correlationism and Beyond

§ 1. CREATION AND INFINITY

Creation and Infinity. No two terms are more central to a monotheistic metaphysics of the divine. All other traditional attributes of the divine either derive from them (from creation one can derive omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) or are synonymous with them (infinity is synonymous with perfection, eternity, omni-presence, omni-benevolence, unicity, etc. and creation is part and parcel of God’s necessity as modal arguments for God show). It is bewildering, then, that while contemporary philosophy does in some Cases attribute infinity to the divine (if only from the perspective of that which exceeds human cognition), it has abandoned a view of God as creator. However, the centrality of these two aspects cannot be denied. No thought of the divine can avoid the issue of the infinite and God’s own infinity, whether it refers to the question of multiple infinites, if there are some infinites greater than others, or if God’s infinity necessitates God’s identification with all that is (pantheism), etc. On the other side, unless one is willing to reduce theology to a species of human psychology and anthropology, the reality of creation must be accounted for. And if one cannot find a way to account philosophically for God as creator and absolutely infinite, then one can turn to mysticism for inspiration.

§2. COGNITIO DEI EXPERIMENTALIS

Gershom Scholem attributes to Thomas Aquinas the definition of mysticism as “cognitio dei experimentalis, the knowledge of God through experience” (Scholem 1995, 4). Scholem and others highlight this definition because it simply captures the essence of mystical experience.’ The mystic attempts to achieve knowledge of God experimentally. Rather than rely on reason or science, the mystic desires a direct experience of the deity and, amazingly, records and presents the results of his/her investigations for public inspection. What is interesting about these results is that insofar as they depend solely on the unique lived experience of the mystic, they cannot, at least not from the philosophical perspective we hope to abide by in this text, justify themselves as true or false. The experimental results of the mystic’s adventure rest on intuition alone and await confirmation. In this way, mystical experience inverts the manner of experimentation associated with the empirical sciences.

It is our contention that philosophy can take the results of such experimental knowledge and see whether they can pass the test of reason and find confirmation in being converted from intuitive, often opaque and mysterious, and even paradoxical statements into metaphysical positions as such. Here, in particular, some of the fundamental results of the

* One model of mysticism is that of female mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila in the Christian tradition. Jacques Lacan in his twentieth seminar, On Feminine Sexuality (1999), famously uses her as an example of female enjoyment beyond the realm of being. For us, this would mean direct mystical contact with the withdrawn nature of God. But such contact while witnessed is itself ineffable. For this reason, while one can point to something beyond the conceptual, it is only from within the framework of conceptuality that it can itself be first framed.

Jewish mystical experience commonly categorized under the name Kabbalah (we think here of what has been called in this literature tzimtzum, shvirah, eyn sof, ayin, etc.) will be articulated in such a way as to see if they can be understood as characterizing a fundamental ontological and theological perspective. The intention is not to explain Kabbalah, but rather to take what it says as the aftermath of a trial that needs itself to be weighed and examined. The tools for doing so will be the resources of philosophy alone and thereby the ultimate goal is to see if the returns of Kabbalah can yield philosophical insight. The entirety of Kabbalah will not be addressed, only those key issues that relate to metaphysics at its basis. The bookshelves of any _ still-standing bookstore’s mysticism section already offer in abundance introductions and explanations of the Kabbalah on its own terms.

It is the ultimate hope of this attempt at confirmation that the spiritual impressions of the Kabbalist will not simply translate into well-known concepts and arguments of previously understood metaphysics, but rather will help to articulate new ideas via the aid of philosophical discourse. It must be emphasized that we are not comparing philosophy and Kabbalah.” If all that is produced here is a comparative study where philosophical ideas are seen as analogous to Kabbalistic ones, then based on the declared intention, the project will have failed. It is also not our desire to discuss the possible historical

2 For such comparative studies, one can turn to Coudert’s Leibniz and the Kabbalah (2010) or Leon-Jones’s Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah (2004) for examples of studies of how Kabbalah influenced particular philosophers. For comparing specific philosophies to what the Kabbalah says, one should turn to the work of Sanford Drob referred to here throughout or Guetta’s Philosophy and Kabbalah (2009).

influence of Kabbalah on philosophers, as has been done with thinkers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Bruno, etc. and could be done on thinkers such as Levinas, Maimon, Schelling, etc. Nor do we want to focus on how the Kabbalah itself is or was possibly influenced by some ancient doctrine such as Pythagoreanism, Neo-Platonism, or Stoicism, not only because most often such suggestions are not based on any textual or historical evidence rather than speculation and because such suggestions could always be inverted given Kabbalists own understanding of the historical dates of their texts and experiments, but more importantly because such an analysis can only result in rehearsing what the ancient doctrine said or attempting to define the basic ideas of Kabbalah.

We take the basic Kabbalistic ideas as having already been defined. This means we will select a specific picture of what the Kabbalah says not in attempt to be true to the best interpretation of what the many Kabbalists have tried to say, but rather in order to bring forth what we should want the Kabbalah to say based on what it has. In this way, rather than explaining the Kabbalah, by attempting to convert it into a set of ontological positions we are arguing for a specific vision of what Kabbalah could and should be about rather than what it might appear to be saying literally. Thus, for us the true Kabbalah requires a philosophical supplement to take the yields of a lived experiment and render its essence.

Of course, in engaging this project we will not be prevented from selecting from the sciences which function in the reverse form as already noted. The results of the theoretical and experimental sciences (in particular, physics) function not to confirm philosophy (rather than philosophy confirming it), but rather to give empirical weight to its theses. For instance, ‘Big Bang’ theory and the evidence surrounding it will be taken as giving further weight to the idea that God creates the world. In this manner, as philosophy can help to confirm the mystic, the physicist can help to push one to one side of a debate between two reasonable metaphysical positions. Famously, this was in part Maimonides’s own approach when he took the physics current in his day as leaning more to a Platonic version of creation rather than an Aristotelian one. His recourse to physics came from a seeming inability to show using pure reason alone that one vision of God must be true.

§3. OUR DEAR FRIEND ATHEISM

Maimonides’s reference to the pagans Plato and Aristotle might seem strange given his accepted place as the philosophical theologian of Judaism. But as Maimonides himself understood, a monotheist often can find aid in articulating his/her own position by working through the positions of one’s opposite or foe. Today, few pagans remain. Rather, the monotheist is opposed by the figure of the atheist. And just as Maimonides passed through the Aristotelian discourse to articulate his own position, here we will pass through the discourse of three declared atheists (or at least anti-religious) thinkers in particular (although we will not be restricted to their work). I am referring to the work of perhaps the two most important living metaphysicians, Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, as well as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Whereas Deleuze can be said to be atheist insofar as his neo-Spinozism relies on a purely immanent understanding of being, Peter Hallward, Badiou’s main interpreter in English, emphasizes the secular and atheistic nature of Badiou’s project by noting how Badiou wants to further the idea of the “laicization” of the infinite by breaking the “religious veil of meaning” as the “true vocation of thought” is to desacralize experience (BST 9).

Badiou derives from the work of Georg Cantor that “God is really dead” (Badiou, qtd. BST 9). His use of Cantor already hints at how a self-declared atheist might help form a monotheistic theology, since Cantor himself was one of the greatest theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such that the reliance on Cantor is already a reliance on a theological discourse. In the list of possible ways theology can engage with Badiou’s ontology, we thereby select what Kenneth Reynhout calls the second possibility: “A second possible response would be to largely accept Badiou’s ontology but argue that his atheist conclusion is unwarranted. This would involve demonstrating that his specific ontological construction, using mathematical set theory does not in fact lead to a denial of an absolute infinite God” (Reynhout 2011, 220).

Meillassoux himself sees his own project as an attempt to combat the religious turn that contemporary phenomenology has taken in France (AF 42). He militates against the legitimation of ‘belief in an absolute’ that he says has arisen due to “scepticism with regard to the metaphysical absolute” itself (AF 46). He detects in French philosophy a “becoming— religious of thought” after the “destruction of the metaphysical rationalization of Christian theology” (AF 42). His main point of contention in opposing the new religious reason found in the work of French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion (about whom we will have more to say) is to attack the “idea of a supreme being” as the anchor of thought (AF 45).

Ultimately, Meillassoux thinks this religious thought finds its support in what he calls “correlationism.” Correlationism is the view that we cannot know the ‘in-itself? without it becoming a ‘for us’ as Hegel would say. All that we can know according to Meillassoux’s presentation of the correlationist view is our own relation to the world and how we come to know it: “The first decision is that of all correlationism—it is the thesis of the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content. All we ever engage with is what is given-tothought, never an entity subsisting by itself” (AF 36). What is important is that for correlationism not only is the in-itself unknowable, but unthinkable as such outside of how the human relates to it. For a correlationist, we cannot talk about what might exist or take place outside of the human orientation to such things.

Such a view represents idealism as opposed to realism. But while Meillassoux seems to believe that such correlationism finds its ultimate expression in religiously-inspired phenomenology, wherein the nature of the divine’s disclosure to thinking is discovered (in addition to Marion, one can list the work of Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Chretien, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michel Henry as representatives of this trend), a theism is traditionally a realist orientation and for good reason. A monotheist must at some point posit and discuss a God that transcends human thought and what can be known, thought, or disclosed to human thought. In this way, a true monotheism will have to oppose correlationism as much as an anti-religious thinker like Meillassoux.*

° Of course, Meillassoux is not the only one opposing correlationism in contemporary philosophy. The philosophical orientation founded and formulated by Graham Harman called ‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ also does so. However, while Harman professes realism throughout his work, his views ultimately devolve into a generalized Kantian idealism as it cannot escape its Husserlian foundations. For Harman, all possible perceivers must be seen as Kantian subjects just as much as the human being is (Harman 2009, 132). Just as the human subject for Kant only ever confronts mental representations of the world conditioned by the specific spatio-temporal structure of human intuition, Harman’s endless perceivers whether living or intimate also only ever confront ‘mental’, as it were, representations of the things that they perceive (Harman 2009, 133-35). In another text, Harman attempts to use the very idea of their being multiple observers to attempt to prove the reality of his substance ontology: “this means that there are discrete observers and perspectives on the world. And if there are discrete realities of this sort, then there must already be individuals, whether or they are the enduring things of traditional substance theory” (Harman 2010a, 782-83). But noting there are many observers does not guarantee that reality in and of itself is constituted by withdrawn things, since even in Kant one has multiple human observers. And from within Harman’s own theory, the only way a person or a rock can know that there are other observers is through observation.

This implies that we can only know by analogy that something else perceives. But we also perceive ourselves without ever perceiving what we are in and of ourselves. It may simply be the case that we are an ever-changing flux. There mere fact of observance or multiple observers does not give evidence to the contrary. Harman’s favorite example to support his view consists of cotton and fire (Harman 2010b, 102). Fire in devouring cotton does not perceive cotton as it is in and of itself, but only profiles and adumbrations of the cotton. Harman here insists with Kant, that there is a thing in itself (the cotton itself) that stands over and above the thing experienced. Even if an object were viewed “from all possible angles under every conceivable condition” (Harman 2009, 132), there is still something about it that withdraws into the in-itself. And for Harman, anything that can be conceived or seen to be a unity whether it is made of up of other objects or not, is itself then ultimately a thing in itself withdrawn permanently and unchangeably form the world (Harman 1999, 241). Making objects withdrawn ultimately leads Harman to an infinite regress and the problems of Kant’s second antinomy (Harman 1999, 245). And such problems have no obvious solution in light of anything Harman elaborates conceptually. In addition, insofar as Harman concludes that any conceptual unity of determinate objects is a thing in itself, he makes it so that despite his desires one must hold with Leibniz that to be a being is to be a being. The implication of that position is that no further differentiation can be made between the real and the intentional (I will advance explicitly and consciously this position later for different purposes following Badiou).

But for Harman the object will always contain some sort of reality in itself that cannot be touched or known or represented by an observer. Objects are thereby withdrawn or in a vacuum for Harman. In fact, for the thing in itself is not even made up of what once were called ‘primary qualities’ as they are not enough to capture the fundamental nature of objecthood (Harman 2009, 195). But without even primary qualities, it is unclear what the thing itself could be for Harman other than a rigid designator or mysterious substrate and ineffable substrate. While later we will argue that anything named is a being, it does not appear Harman wants that sort of seeming ontological idealism, but by turning the thing itself into the name of a secular negative theology of everyday objects without noting why such objects must be so withdrawn as would be gods due to an infinite nature or something else it appears as though it does without cause. Harman here attempts to distinguish his own position from Kant by suggesting that the Kantian thing-in-itself simply “haunts” human knowledge without these things interacting with each other (Harman 2009, 186). But as noted, this point merely generalizes Kantian idealism without changing its basic structure. While he insists on the thing itself, Kant’s positing of the thing in itself was the most dogmatic moment in Kant for even if after Kant one will agree that how we perceive reality may not match what it is in itself, that does not in and of itself allow one to conclude that the in itself is itself structured by vacuum-packed objects and withdrawn ineffable substances (Harman 1999, 210).

Harman’s real versus sensuous (intentional) distinction falls back into the problems of naive realism as well as highlighted more so by phenomenology (Harman 2010b, 102). The issue with the in-itself is not that it is withdrawn, but whether we can say how it is structured. Later, in this text, we will argue that the in-itself should be seen as structured by structure itself or information. This structural or informational realism stands in sharp contrast to the substance ontology of Object-Oriented philosophy. Everyone says the in-itself is withdrawn from phenomenal contact. But Harman’s theory is thereby not far removed from Plato, although he would seemingly deny this type of realism vehemently. Plato thought that my experience of this computer for instance means there is a computer in itself. Harman’s theory does the same. We then have all the problems of the relation between the thing in itself and the phenomenal representation, etc. In particular, one could here enter into a deconstructionist critique as it is not clear that my idea of the tree does depend on the tree itself. Why could it not be that we are born with an idea of a tree? Can we recognize the tree without first having its mental representation? We have the intentional relations that overlay the real ones.

But the problem for Object-Oriented Ontology is that the in-itself might simply be objectless in its structuration. Harman’s theory very clearly presupposes it must be constituted by individual substances as much as Kant’s did. But again nothing shows it must. For instance, I experience about 1000 objects on my desk. But my computer might only experience everything as a part of one object or simply as experienced as such (that is, without singling out distinct objects). My phenomenological consciousness looks at a mountain range and can separate a single mountain, but who is to say there is not just the range, earth, etc. While Harman insists on the realism of his positions, Husserl in Logical Investigations at the beginning is great on how we can decide what aspects of a thing are essential and what accidental, what separable and what not, in a new phenomenological way. For instance, he shows that coloration is not something separate. But this is all done on the basis of consciousness. It is not clear how Harman would be able to differentiate himself from Husserl in order to claim that one version of the object is the one that truly mirrors or mimics the thing in itself. Now, Husserl would agree with Harman that an object is “an ideal unity over and against its objects” (Harman 2009, 152), but only consciousness for Husserl can know that. It is not clear outside of consciousness in its phenomenological sense as foundation and constituting moment how Harman can make and substantiate his claim. When we add up the two ‘experiences,’ we do not have reason to say that the in-itself has a particular structuration.

Further, Harman’s contention that no matter how many perspectives on a thing one has (Harman 2009, 261), one never has the thing in itself has to presuppose that things are infinite. If a thing is finite in any sense and capable of only a finite number of perspectives, then it would be added up. But what demonstrates for Harman or otherwise that a tree or hammer is infinite in character? Are there truly an infinite number of perspectives? If there are, do they exist in actuality all at once or only potentially and indefinitely? Until it can be shown that a flame is infinite in nature, Harman’s point cannot hold. But that is the problem with founding realist ontology on what is essentially basis of Kantian idealism and Husserlian phenomenology. Object- Oriented Ontology would have to show somehow that the very ability of phenomenological consciousness to divide up the world necessitates that the real is structured as a plurality of objects/things/substances. I am not familiar with such an argument. Just saying we use a hammer so there must be a hammer that overlies it remains easily within the phenomenological and intentional sphere (cf. Harman 2009, 133-35). Harman also believes that from Heidegger’s analysis of the hammer as something ready-to-hand one can deduce substance ontology (Harman 1999, 209-11). But Heidegger’s distinction between the present-at-hand and the ready-tohand is not about establishing that reality in itself is structured by withdrawn impermeable substances rather it is to emphasize how practical engagement precedes theoretical engagement, how intentionality is not characterizable in terms primarily of a disinterested scientist and observation consciousness as Husserl did, that intentionality hammering for example is an intentional stance with its own correlative object pole just as much seeing or thinking, and that the attitude of seeing things as mental representations always follows from a pre-consciousness access to the world. That is to say, the notion of tool-being does not escape the correlationist circle, but rather forms one of its key radii. The hammer only appears as a present-at hand object when it is broken, but before that it is a pole of a hammeringhammered relation that shows how consciousness is toolimited a sphere for how Dasein relates and comports to the world in every action. The broken hammer merely shifts Dasein into a new form of comportment. Most comportment is not reflective.

In still other contexts, Harman puts forth that, for instance, our knowledge of a tree does not reproduce the tree (Haman 2010, 788). Since our mental representation of a tree for Harman does not bear fruit or grow, there must be a real tree in itself out there. First, as we know from Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1997), Kant begins in a way with the idea that imagination is finite and not creative as opposed to the imagination and mind of God where the hammer is made real. It really does hammer, etc. That is, for Kant our infinitude is a productive limitation that structures experience and is felt most directly via the nature of our imagination, its limitations, and its powers. I do think and will try to substantiate later that knowledge of a thing can produce that thing in its full stance. God is of course the agency that best shows how this can be done. Leibniz also with his identity of the identical also shows how perhaps even a very advanced computer with a Star Trek-like holo-room might be able to do it. In any event, the excess of the hammer as I know it in its profiles over the thing as such is internal to consciousness. It is also not necessarily something that for Husserl in principle cannot be done. The profiles could be added up. The other side of the coin, or all the sides of the cube, at best can be added up and at worst shows the incompletion of experience rather than the thing itself. An important text here is the key section in Totality and Infinity (1969) where, for Levinas, it is the face of the other that is infinite and not a pair of dice. The face is infinite due to the way in which the otherness of the other can never be presented phenomenally and yet calls upon me. The other side of the coin can be presented phenomenally just not at the same time as the first side. Unless Harman can show how something like consciousness informs each thing in the same way as it does for the other in Levinas, there cannot be a claim to the same implications. At best, we can agree with Harman that the in-itself exists,

To accept Méeillassoux’s characterization of contemporary philosophy as trapped in understanding the world only as it appears and not as it is in itself is not also to accept Meillassoux’s anti-religiosity, but rather to accept religion itself. To truly articulate a thought of God (and in particular, God as a creator) requires that all of being not circle around the self and the world as it discloses itself to it. In this way, a philosophical confirmation of Kabbalah will entail a viewpoint that also criticizes and departs from the correlationist view.

must exist, and that each view presupposes it. Kant himself often speaks as though the phenomenal computer must be mirrored by a computer in itself (and thereby retains the dogmatism he thinks he has overcome). It is only with phenomenology and the reduction that that issue is neutralized so we can speak about the meaning of Being without these problems of dogmatic (at least after Kant we use that term) realism. In any event, it is precisely Harman’s own articulations that show that objects only exist for a consciousness and reinforce and remain within correlationism.

Chapter One

§4. THE CRITIQUE OF ONTO-THEO-LOGY

One of the main challenges such a theistic realism would have from philosophy today is the critique of metaphysics that characterizes it as ‘onto-theo-logy.’ Ontology means the investigation of beings as beings with regard to what is most fundamental and essential about being. Theology on the other hand traditionally attempts to understand the nature of the highest or most supreme being. Metaphysics as onto-theo-logy per this rendering understands beings as a whole in terms of the supreme being. This might mean that God as the supreme being is seen as the ground and cause of beings and being itself (Heidegger 2002, 34, 58, 61, 69-70) or that God is being itself (all beings are ultimately expressions of God), as Paul Tillich famously posited. Onto-theo-logy then consists of this view that all of being and the nature of individual beings cannot be understood with reference to a particular being.

For the early 20'-century philosopher Martin Heidegger, such a promotion of God obliterates the difference between Being (the experience of something as being, that something is) and beings (the individual beings themselves) (Heidegger 2002, 50-51). Another way to put this ontological difference is to say it names the difference between “that which is composed of [a] thing in its talitative ‘suchness’ and the same thing in its transcendental unity. After all, the ‘this’ is nothing if not a specific unity, a ‘this’ in opposition to all that is not this” (Harman 1999, 258).

To explain further: metaphysical thought characterized as _ onto-theo-logy obfuscates the difference between the universality of being—ness and the individual instances of such being presumably by not allowing for a thought of existence as such to appear without reference to how a particular exists. No particular being can encapsulate what being is any more than a particular type of fruit (strawberry, banana, etc.) can name what fruit itself is insofar as fruit covers all the different types of fruit (Heidegger 2002, 66).

However, while many take onto-theo-logy as a category of critique, Heidegger, who defined it, asserted and insisted that Being itself does not appear, but rather necessarily withdraws. One never has an experience of pure is-ness, but only ever encounters particular beings (Heidegger 2002, 66). In this sense, the difference between Being and beings is veiled and the forgetting of the difference belongs to the very difference itself between the two terms (Heidegger 2002, 50). It is not a matter of human forgetfulness, but rather pertains to the very structure of Being itself that it is veiled in particular beings (Heidegger 2002, 51). In addition, for Heidegger “the onto-theological character of metaphysics has become questionable for thinking, not because of any kind of atheism, but from the experience of thinking which has discerned in onto-theo-logy the still unthought of the essential nature of metaphysics” (Heidegger 2002, 55). In other words, for Heidegger himself, onto-theo-logy may be unavoidable until the very nature of the difference between Being and beings can be thought. Here, the challenge is to think of Being as not grounded in anything other than its own givenness.